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For immediate release
Public Art Fund and the Whitney Museum of American Art announce…
DAVID ALTMEJD • ASSUME VIVID
ASTRO FOCUS • LIZ CRAFT
YAYOI KUSAMA • PAUL McCARTHY • DAVE MULLER • OLAV WESTPHALEN
March 10 - May 30, 2004
With three days of special events April 17-19
New York, NY - For the 2004 Biennial Exhibition, the Public Art Fund
will expand its previous collaboration with the Whitney Museum of American
Art to present nine installations by seven artists throughout the entire
length of Central Park, from 60th Street to 110th Street. Building upon
the outdoor presentation of Biennial works in 2002, this year's show will
include artists' site-specific reactions to the park as well as several
sculptural projects that were conceived independently of location. For
the first time, the exhibition will include a weekend event of openings
and participatory artists' projects in the park. This outdoor component
of the 2004 Biennial Exhibition is curated by Public Art Fund director
Tom Eccles in collaboration with Whitney Museum curators Chrissie Iles,
Shamim M. Momin, and Debra Singer.
The projects will open in two phases. The first group, opening on March
10, includes sculptural works by Paul McCarthy, Olav Westphalen, Liz Craft,
and David Altmejd. Ranging from Westphalen's tabloid-inspired sculpture
of a life-size tiger to McCarthy's giant pink inflatable Daddies Bighead,
the projects collectively showcase the new preeminence of the figure in
contemporary art. Although McCarthy, Westphalen, and Craft have each created
projects with the Public Art Fund in recent years, this will be the first-ever
public artwork made by David Altmejd, whose intricate and often grotesque
sculptures of werewolf heads demonstrate a vital and visceral direction
in sculpture.
On April 17, three locations in the park will be given over to openings
and participatory projects with artists assume vivid astro focus, Dave
Muller, and Yayoi Kusama. The Skate Circle-the group that runs the seasonal
weekly disco skate gatherings mid-park near 72nd Street-will welcome assume
vivid astro focus's Garden 10, featuring a special afternoon performance
by the Los Angeles-based band Los Super Elegantes. Dave Muller's Three
Day Weekend, one of a series of nomadic artist-curated exhibitions
he has organized around the world, will be on view in the Arsenal Gallery
(through Monday, April 19). Yayoi Kusama's untitled sculptural work will
go on view in the Conservatory Waters, just steps away from the Alice
in Wonderland statue where she staged a "body festival" happening
in 1968 - a coincidence that is especially fitting given the key roles
that social interaction and artistic collaboration play in the work of
both Muller and assume vivid astro focus. A second press release will
follow in the near future with information about the weekend's events.
This ambitious exhibition, sponsored by Bloomberg LP and generously supported
by Adam Lindemann, is the result of a major collaborative effort between
the Public Art Fund, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the New York
City Department of Parks & Recreation. Brochures with a map of the
exhibition sites and schedule of events will be available in Central Park's
visitor centers and at the Whitney Museum; information can also be found
online at www.publicartfund.org
and www.whitney.org
or can be requested by calling 212-980-3942.
OPENING MARCH 10:
Paul McCarthy's Daddies Bighead and MJBH, Liz Craft's The
Spare, Olav Westphalen's The Weight of Dead Prey, and David
Altmejd's Untitled (Swallow) and Untitled (Bluejay).
| Paul McCarthy |
| • |
Daddies Bighead, 2003
At Lasker Rink and Pool
Enter park at Fifth Avenue and 106th Street |
| • |
MJBH, 2002
At Doris C. Freedman Plaza
Fifth Avenue and 60th Street |
|
Anchoring the exhibition at the northern and southern ends of Central
Park will be two sculptures by Los Angeles-based artist Paul McCarthy.
Over the past three decades, McCarthy has plumbed conceptual art,
popular culture, and the human psyche to create a highly personalized
and provocative body of work. Daddies Bighead (2003), sited
at Lasker Rink in the northern end of the park, is a 50-foot-tall
pink inflatable sculpture. Sitting atop a slender, very vertical
body, the oversized head that gives the piece its name will be visible
from 110th Street and elsewhere within the park. Daddies Bighead
is the sculptural result of an ongoing series of mixed-media works
that date back to 1983, when McCarthy incorporated an actual bottle
of the British product Daddies Ketchup into a performance. The bottle,
which bears the face of what McCarthy has called "the quintessential
1950s dad," resurfaced in McCarthy's work in 2001 as a several-story
inflatable sculpture. Since then, McCarthy has reworked and abstracted
the form, ultimately creating this new inflatable, which bears only
the slightest resemblance to its predecessors. With bulging eyes,
a carrot-shaped nose, and several protruding irregularities, Daddies
Bighead is at once goofy and awful-a roadside attraction gone
bizarrely awry. The work was first exhibited outside the Tate Modern
in London for McCarthy's recent exhibition there.
McCarthy's MJBH (2002), located at Doris C. Freedman Plaza,
is one of a series of recent works by McCarthy based on artist Jeff
Koons's famous sculpture, Michael Jackson and Bubbles (1988),
which was itself a representation of a publicity photograph of the
superstar. Dispensing with the rococo delicacy of Koons's oversized
ceramic figurine, McCarthy's sculpture is an abstracted representation
of Michael Jackson sitting with his pet monkey. Its title, an abbreviation
of "Michael Jackson Big Head," describes both the subject
and McCarthy's characteristic figurative exaggeration. With cartoonish
feet, large heads with inscrutable features, and relatively small
bodies, the two figures merge into one tangled multi-limbed form.
Made in 2002, just before the recent avalanche of press coverage
on the legendary pop star, McCarthy's sculpture considers the nature
of celebrity, re-imagining the familiar image of Jackson and his
sidekick in monumental, grotesquely unfamiliar form.
|
Liz Craft
The Spare, 2003-04
At Doris C. Freedman Plaza
Fifth Avenue and 60th Street
Liz Craft often casts everyday objects in fantastical, unsettling scenarios,
resulting in appealing show-stoppers that plant themselves at the busy
intersection of pop culture and high art. Working in a variety of materials-including
polyurethane, fiberglass, bronze and wood-Craft creates works that are
at once wry, flamboyant, and slightly sinister. Like fellow Los Angeles-based
artist Paul McCarthy, California native Craft takes inspiration from the
familiar cultural landscape, referencing hippies, Hell's Angels, psychedelia,
and other vernacular iconography in her meticulously crafted sculptures.
At Doris C. Freedman Plaza-adjacent to McCarthy's Michael Jackson Big
Head (bronze)-Craft shows three versions of The Spare, a bronze
sculpture of a prickly pear cactus growing from a discarded tire. Craft's
trio of cacti would be a banal sight in any Southwestern landscape, but
in New York they are exotic transplants from a desert junkyard, offering
stark counterpoint to Central Park's lush, well-kept expanse and playfully
challenging our notions of "high" versus "low" art.
Olav Westphalen
The Weight of Dead Prey, 2004
On Wien Walk near the entrance to the Central Park Zoo
Enter park at Fifth Avenue and 60th Street
Olav Westphalen's artistic practice locates itself between the realms
of art and daily life, an approach pioneered by Allan Kaprow (with whom
he studied in California) and further explored by Los Angeles performance
and conceptual artists including Paul McCarthy. Westphalen views caricature
and comics as a way to challenge the "serious" traditions of
art derived from Modernism and Minimalism. His art often takes the guise
of the one-liner but nevertheless flips immediately into a serious reflection
on just what kind of criticality is possible in caricature. Inspired by
the spate of recent news coverage of incidents involving domesticated
wild animals-tigers in particular-Westphalen's The Weight of Dead Prey
is a life-size sculpture of a ferocious tiger, who reclines in a small
fenced-in area alongside a path outside the zoo. Near the tiger will be
a few large objects, modeled after the toys given to large animals in
captivity-balls with appendages that are literally made to approximate
"the weight of dead prey." Made of hand-carved and polished
fiberglass, the sculpture will look slightly realistic, but also something
like a folk art woodcarving. Positioned near the entrance to the Central
Park Zoo, The Weight of Dead Prey is a reminder-delivered with
Westphalen's characteristic light touch-of our double-edged need to reign
in nature's wild kingdom even as we romanticize it.
David Altmejd
Untitled (Swallow) and Untitled (Blue Jay), 2004
At the Andrew Haswell Green Memorial
Enter park at Fifth Avenue and 106th Street
Awkward yet elegant, David Altmejd's werewolf heads are carefully crafted
sculptural objects that explore notions of attraction and repulsion. In
their frequent appearances in fairy tales, Greek mythology, and Hollywood
B-movies, werewolves embody tensions between sympathy and horror. In his
gallery installations, Altmejd depicts these creatures-part-human and
part-beast-as decaying objects, often installing them within mirrored,
modernist sculptural settings in order to tease out comparisons between
organic and inorganic materiality. For Central Park, Altmejd will create
two oversized werewolf heads, approximately five feet in length, which
are encrusted with glitter, pearls, and sparkling rhinestones and crystals.
These bejeweled grotesqueries, at once seductive and macabre, are contained
in two Plexiglas cases, apparently preserving them in two starkly different
stages of decomposition. Installed in a bucolic location in the northern
end of Central Park, Altmejd's werewolf works present the viewer with
a dramatically visceral, melancholy, and novel example of contemporary
sculpture.
OPENING APRIL 17:
assume vivid astro focus's Garden 10, Dave Muller's Three Day
Weekend, and Yayoi Kusama's untitled work for the Conservatory Water.
assume vivid astro focus
Garden 10, 2004
Between the Mall and the Sheep Meadow
Enter park at 72nd Street
April 17- May 4
When he first arrived in New York from his native Brazil, artist assume
vivid astro focus was struck by the vibrancy of the many activities that
take place in Central Park, particularly that of the Skate Circle-a group
that transforms an unused section of pavement into a disco dance roller
rink on spring and summer weekends, providing New Yorkers with a favorite
hometown spectator sport. Drawing from a wide variety of popular sources-psychedelic
album covers, Brazilian pop music stars, coloring books, Op Art, and Peter
Max-inspired graphics, to name just a few-assume vivid astro focus will
create Garden 10, a spectacular floorscape for the surface of the
Skate Circle site. Tinged with nostalgic and utopian appeal, this colorful
vinyl sticker will set the stage for the talented roller-skaters, who
come from all over the city to show off their exuberant, practiced moves
on the roller dance floor. On April 17, the Skate Circle will officially
open its season with assume vivid astro focus and special guests, Los
Super Elegantes, who will perform at Garden 10.
Yayoi Kusama
Untitled work for the Conservatory Water
Enter park at 72nd Street
April 17 - May 30
Yayoi Kusama, one of the most influential and widely recognized artists
of the 1960s, will create a new work for Central Park's Conservatory Water.
In the late sixties, Kusama's happenings and nude performances were a
regular feature of the city's public landscape and included a "body-festival"
at the Alice in Wonderland sculpture in Central Park. Her work for this
exhibition, floating mirror balls in a pond, also connects back to her
notorious Narcissus Garden for the 1966 Venice Biennale where the
artist was censured for selling her 1,500 mirror globes under a sign that
read, "Your Narcissism for Sale." Over the past three decades,
Kusama has often revisited mirrored forms in her work, exploring notions
of infinity, illusion, and repetition in discrete sculptures and room-size
installations, as in the recent The Fireflies on the Water (2002).
For Kusama, the use of repeated forms is the obsessive public expression
of a lifetime of hallucinations, a personal focus that has remained consistent
throughout her diverse body of work. For the Conservatory Water-the small
pond just steps away from the site of her earlier happening-Kusama will
install hundreds of silvered balls within a contained circular area, drawing
the viewer into her alluring and unsettling visual world.
Dave Muller
Three Day Weekend, 2004
The Arsenal Gallery (The Arsenal Building, Third Floor, Fifth Avenue and
64th Street)
April 17 - 19
Since 1994, the Los Angeles-based artist Dave Muller has been organizing
"Three Day Weekends," a series of roving, intermittent group
exhibitions-he describes the ongoing project as an "artist-run, nomadic
project space." These shows remain on view for only three days and
then disappear as suddenly as they arrived, remaining after the fact as
little more than a rumor. Non-hierarchical and inclusive in nature, Muller's
"Three Day Weekends" critique art world conventions even as
they participate in them: Muller condenses the formal structure of mainstream
gallery and museum exhibitions, offering an affable, open-ended alternative
that emphasizes the social experience of viewing art. For Muller, who
is also a musician and DJ, collaboration and appropriation are recurring
strains in his work-he incorporates and pays homage to the works of other
artists, just as DJs sample other people's music at the turntable. For
Central Park, Muller presents Three Day Weekend, presenting the
work of eight artists along with a wall work by Muller.
The Public Art Fund projects in Central Park, presented in collaboration
with the Whitney Museum of American Art, are sponsored by Bloomberg and
generously supported by Adam Lindemann.
David Altmejd's Untitled (Swallow) and Untitled (Bluejay),
and assume vivid astro focus's Garden 10 are all projects of the
Public Art Fund program In
the Public Realm, which is supported by the National Endowment
for the Arts, The New York State Council on the Arts, A State Agency,
the City of New York Department of Cultural Affairs, the Office of the
Brooklyn Borough President, The Greenwall Foundation, The Silverweed Foundation,
The JPMorgan Chase Foundation, and friends of the Public Art Fund.
This exhibition is made possible through the cooperation of the New York
City Department of Parks & Recreation.
About Public Art Fund
The Public Art Fund is New York's leading presenter of artists' projects,
new commissions, installations and exhibitions in public spaces. With
over 25 years of experience and an international reputation, the Public
Art Fund identifies, coordinates and realizes a diversity of major projects
by both established and emerging artists throughout New York City. By
bringing artworks outside the traditional context of museums and galleries,
the Public Art Fund provides a unique platform for an unparalleled public
encounter with the art of our time.
The Public Art Fund is a non-profit arts organization supported by generous
gifts from individuals, foundations, and corporations, and with public
funds from The New York State Council on the Arts, a State Agency, and
the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs.
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Contact:
Public Art Fund
tel: (212) 980-4575
e-mail: press@publicartfund.org
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