What's New at Moving Image London 2013.

Moving Image London 2013 is a few short weeks away, and this year we'd like to share with you some exciting new programs, partnerships and services featured at the fair:
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Have Questions about Video Art?

We are very excited to announce the launch of the Moving Image AV Bar. Staffed by audio-video experts, the AV Bar is designed to help answer the technical and logistical questions you may have about collecting or presenting video art.

With sample contracts and certificates of authenticity, a range of the latest models of projectors and monitors, and friendly, helpful staffers ready to assist with any issue you may have experienced, whether related to file formats, hardware issues, or aesthetics, the Moving Image AV Bar is designed to help make collecting film and video art more relaxing and enjoyable.

Appointments for the AV Bar can be requested in person at the Moving Image London 2013 front desk during regular fair hours. The AV Bar is open each day of the fair from 12 - 4 PM.

For more information visit: http://www.moving-image.info/moving-image-av-bar/

National #Selfie Portrait Gallery

Curators Kyle Chayka and Marina Galperina will present National #Selfie Portrait Gallery, an installation of 16 emerging artists from the EU and the US who have created short-form videos engaging with the medium and concept of the “selfie,” the omnipresent slang for the digital self-portraits found across all social networks.

Self-portraiture has a long artistic heritage, with devotees including Rembrandt, the compulsive self-documentarian, Courbet, who styled himself a suave, long-haired Bohemian, and van Gogh, the fragile genius, bandaged at the ear. Today, the genre belongs to anyone with a camera. Self-portraiture is the most democratic artistic medium available, not merely as a performative outlet for the social self, but also as an intimate route of personal catharsis for today’s artists.

Installed on two screens, National #Selfie Portrait Gallery will display a rotating series of short videos commissioned for the project, each 30 seconds or less in length. The artists, including Bunny Rogers, Rollin Leonard, Jayson Musson (Hennessy Youngman), Yung Jake, Leslie Kulesh, Kim Asendorf, Ole Fach, and Jesse Darling, were selected specifically for their established practices, ranging from poetic internet confessionals to experimental, process-minded new media portraiture and humorous, subversive commentaries on exhibitionism.

National #Selfie Portrait Gallery explores the range of performativity, personality, authenticity, and expression inherent in the #selfie form, from the instant gratification of its creation to the popularity contests of its publication. The #selfie is as omnipresent as the smartphone and as diverse as humanity itself.

The artist videos will be sold in editions of five for $500 each for the duration of the fair. Visitors will also be encouraged to contribute to the discussion by taking their own Instagram or Vine selfies and tagging them #NSPG.

Full Artist List: United States: Anthony Antonellis,Yung Jake, Rollin Leonard, Jayson Musson, Alexander Porter, Bunny Rogers, Angela Washko, Jennifer Chan || Europe: Kim Asendorf, Rhys Coren, Jesse Darling, Leslie Kulesh, Carlos Sáez, Daniel Swan, Addie Wagenknecht, Saoirse Wall

Curators:
Kyle Chayka is the curator of Dying on Stage: New Painting in New York at Garis and Hahn Gallery in New York City, co-curator of Shortest Video Art Ever Sold at Moving Image Art Fair New York 2012, and a freelance writer for publications including the New York Observer, Pacific Standard, and Modern Painters.

Marina Galperina is a co-curator of Shortest Video Art Ever Sold at Moving Image Art Fair New York 2012 and new media and video art pop-up shows around Brooklyn. She is the Managing Editor of culture/news site ANIMAL New York and a freelance writer for ARTnews, New York Magazine, The Atlantic, BAKU, and Candy.

Contact information: Curators: chaykak@gmail.com, magalperina@gmail.com
Moving Image: murat@moving-image.info

Moving Image Online Exclusively at Artsy.net

We are excited to announce an exclusive online partnership with Artsy.net for Moving Image London 2013. The exclusive online preview of Moving Image London will launch on Artsy on October 10th, one week prior to the fair opening.

The fair coverage on Artsy will serve as a dedicated online resource for collectors to browse artists, works, and exhibitors, explore editorial coverage and top picks from art world insiders, and inquire about artworks remotely.

Artsy is an online platform for discovering, discussing, and collecting art, featuring 50,000+ works by 11,000+ artists sourced from over 400 leading galleries and 100 nonprofit institutions worldwide. In addition to serving as the go-to online destination to browse artwork listings and exhibitions from the world's best galleries, Artsy offers comprehensive coverage of top international art fairs. For example, Artsy’s partnership with The Armory Show this past March received over 250,000 visits from 170+ countries, generating an audience 5X larger than in-person visitors to the fair.

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Nitehawk's Art Seen and Moving Image London


Moving Image and Nitehawk Cinema are happy to announce their continued partnership for the Moving Image Art Fair. Once again three videos from the 2013 London edition of the fair will be selected to screen in the cinema this fall.
Nitehawk programmer, Caryn Coleman, has launched a screening program called Art Seen, formed to cultivate the relationship between artist moving images and the cinematic space. She will choose three works from Moving Image London to be screened throughout the program.

Art Seen is a monthly art-focused program showing artist documentaries, the art world in film, and artist-directed features that also includes a guest-curated artist moving image program pre-show.

Nitehawk Cinema is an independent movie house with a selective approach to film, food, and drink. Located in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, Nitehawk offers audiences an unparalleled cinematic experience by combining first-run, repertory film programming, and signature programming such as Live Sound Cinema, The Works, and Music Driven, along with tableside food and beverage service in all theaters. For more information on Nitehawk Cinema please visit nitehawkcinema.com

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The Moving Image Award

Moving Image is very pleased to announce details on the second annual Moving Image Award to be presented October 17, 2013, the opening day of the London version of the fair. This year, the Moving Image Award will fund the acquisition of an artwork from the fair for the permanent collection of 53 Art Museum in Guangzhou, China. The award is sponsored by Qiongbo Li, founder of Guangdong Wanpin Culture & Art Development Co., Ltd, in Guangzhou, China.

Established in 2012 to help incorporate video and film into the permanent collections of art institutions, the inaugural Moving Image Award honored San Francisco collectors Pamela and Richard Kramlich, who have supported contemporary artists working in video, film, and new media through their private collection and through the New Art Trust, a non-profit organization they founded to advance the collection, preservation, exhibition, and understanding of technology-based art forms. The Kramlichs’ dedication has inspired Moving Image to reach out to similarly-minded supporters to expand the inclusion of video, film and new media in museum collections globally. The inaugural Moving Image Award funded an acquisition by Tate for their permanent collection, as selected by Tate's Curator of Film, Stuart Comer.

The Moving Image Award grants $10,000 toward an acquisition for the permanent collection of 53 Art Museum, the first non-profit private contemporary art museum in the major Chinese city of Guangzhou. 53 Art Museum's building was designed from repurposed China rail hangars, resulting in a unique environment that echoes history and contemporary trends in architecture. Under the slogan of "Standing in Guangdong, with eyes on the world", 53 Art Museum devotes itself to promoting contemporary art, especially video art.


For more information, visit http://www.moving-image.info/the-moving-image-award/

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Returning to Moving Image London 2013: BYOB!!!

Clare Holden and João Laia host a presentation of third edition of the very popular BYOB (Bring Your Own Beamer) on the opening night of Moving Image on Thursday, October 17th 6-8PM.

Building on the success of last year’s BYOB event, which was held in the atmospheric attic space of the Bargehouse, this year even more artists and filmmakers will be involved to present and a true spectrum of moving image works by emerging artists. BYOB is a series of one-night-exhibitions hosting artists, their work and their projectors.

The event will include a series of artists that will collaborate on site to create a moving image performance. Each artist will choose the work to be exhibited and bring his or her own projection apparatus.

For more information, visit byoblondon2013.tumblr.com

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About Moving Image Art Fair

Moving Image will return to The Bargehouse, October 17-20, 2013, during Frieze Art Fair in London. Located within short walking distance of Tate Modern, the Bargehouse is just behind the Oxo Tower on the South Bank.

Entry to Moving Image is free to the public and open Thursday, October 17, 2-6pm, with opening reception 6 - 8 pm. –Friday and Saturday, October 18 – 19, 11 am – 7 pm, and on Sunday, October 20, 11 am – 6 pm.


Moving Image was conceived to offer a unique viewing experience with the excitement and vitality of a fair, while allowing moving image-based artworks to be understood and appreciated on their own terms. Moving Image London 2013 will feature a selection of international commercial galleries and non-profit institutions presenting single-channel videos, single-channel projections, video sculptures, and other larger video installations.


Founded by Murat Orozobekov and Edward Winkleman of New York's Winkleman Gallery, Moving Image takes place each year in New York and London.


Moving Image
October 17–20, 2013

Bargehouse
Oxo Tower Wharf
Bargehouse Street
South Bank
London SE1 9PH, UK

Map It

Admission to Moving Image is free and open to the public.


Hours:
Thursday, October 17, 2013: 2 pm – 6 pm
Opening reception: Thursday, October 17, 2013: 6-8 pm
Friday – Saturday, October 18-19, 2013: 11 am – 7 pm
Sunday, October 20, 2013: 11 am – 6 pm

Bargehouse is owned and managed
by Coin Street Community Builders
www.coinstreet.org

For more information, contact Edward Winkleman at (1) 212.643.3152 or contact@moving-image.info. Or visit www.moving-image.info

Ann Fensterstock's "Art on the Block" Book Signing, or "Get Your Galatea Here"

I've read Ann Fensterstock's new book Art on the Block: Tracking the New York Art World from SoHo to the Bowery, Bushwick and Beyond (which chronicles the past 60 years or so of artist and gallery communities across New York, and for which we are hosting a book signing this Thursday, September 19 [see details below]) a few times now, and noticed an interesting arc to how the narrative was registering with me. Ann's book manages to be both dense and wonderfully readable at the same time. I've twice now nearly missed my subway stop while reading it (even on the second read), being so absorbed in its charmingly told anecdotes and abundance of data about the artists and dealers I assumed I already knew so well.

But that arc I mentioned. Following Ann's narrative as she follows the city's art scene from Uptown to Soho, over into the East Village, and ultimately splitting into Chelsea and across the East River into Williamsburg, I would not only recognize the stories and people in them...slowly I'd begin to read of events I had attended or of people who are close friends of mine. Slowly, like Galatea did for Pygmalion, the story comes alive for me, personally, and I'm reading about myself.  OK, so quite literally in a few places I'm reading about myself (our gallery is included in the history), but in general I mean I'm reading about all the shows or events that helped shaped who I have become as a dealer. At a certain point, Ann's history stops playing in black and white in my mind's eye and emerges into full Technicolor. Indeed, as her tale marches forward into the Lower East Side and Bushwick, it becomes so real and now, it's virtually a holographic experience.

But it's so much more than a mirror held up to the art world. In the opening chapter, Ann outlines several sociological variables that explain the relentlessly migratory nature of the New York art world. Noting how no one of these variables explains this nomadic history, she offers instead the notion of a constant interweaving of real estate, politics, the economy, community, practicality, and yes, even advances in the size or format [i.e., physical requirements] of the art itself, as the reason we all seem so restless, and brilliantly carries that through the entire book. Indeed, the text is very subtly quite academic. But don't worry, her style is so enjoyable you'll hardly notice.

That last notion listed, though, that the New York art world moves to accommodate advances in the type of art being created holds a great deal of interest for me. Here's a snippet of how Ann outlines this history [any typos below are mine]:

Subsequent shifts in the centers of art have also been catalyzed by changes in the form, medium, size, or installation demands of the new, new art. Obtrusive columns that broke up the open floors of SoHo lofts, charming as they might have looked in the 1970s, became problematic as big installations got even bigger. A wooden floor's weight-bearing capacity was sometimes an issue, a third-floor location impossible to reach and a loading dock crucial for oversized pieces. With the increasing prevalence of video work, acoustics started to matter as conflicting soundtracks fought for attention. The wide-open concrete boxes of Chelsea's taxi garages beckoned.

A little over a week ago, we visited the new Hauser and Wirth space on 18th Street with two European artists we're currently showing. Their galleries in Europe are more or less the size of our space, and we prepared them for how gargantuan H&W was. Both were struck by what it would mean to them to exhibit in such a hall. They both enthusiastically agreed they'd welcome the opportunity, and yet when pressed neither were quite sure at the moment what they'd fill it with. Which is fair enough on one side, but leads me to believe we're entering an era in which this idea of galleries changing locations to accommodate the "new, new art" has a  flip side. At a certain point, artists have to change their thinking to accommodate such spaces, too.

Moreover, if new types of art being made play a major role in how the story of the art scene (and the types of spaces galleries open in particular) evolves, what might that mean with regard to the growing field of digital, online, and social-media based art? On the surface of it, perhaps not that much different from what we see today. Bigger spaces can always put up extra walls, documentation of performances or other ephemeral work will likely remain a staple of the gallery sphere, and there are already art galleries in Second Life, but even as I typed the phrase above "virtually a holographic experience," I began to wonder.

Either way, the real history of how artists and dealers have moved around the Big Apple is an essential foundation to thinking more about the future, and it's with that in mind I most highly recommend Ann's book. If you would like to know where you can get a copy, well, we'll have some available for purchase at the gallery this coming Thursday, where you can meet Ann and get your copy signed. I hope you'll join us!

Ann Fensterstock's Art on the Block: Tracking the New York Art World from SoHo to the Bowery, Bushwick and Beyond will be released by Palgrave Macmillan on September 17th, 2013.

Meet the Author / Book signing
Thursday, September 19th, 6:30pm
Winkleman Gallery
621 West 27th Street
New York, NY 10001

Moving Image London 2013: Participating Artists and Galleries!!!

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE                                         September 10, 2013

Still from Annika Larsson's “Animal in 14 movements,” 2012, video, 41 minutes.

To be presented at Moving image London 2013 by Andréhn-Schiptjenko, Stockholm, Sweden.

Moving Image

October 17–20, 2013

Bargehouse
Oxo Tower Wharf
Bargehouse Street
South Bank
London SE1 9PH, UK

Moving Image Art Fair returns to the distinctive four-story Bargehouse, behind the Oxo Tower, for its third London edition, October 17-20, 2013. Moving Image London 2013 will host an international selection of over 30 single-channel videos, video sculptures, and larger video installations, presented by galleries from Europe, North America, South America, and the Middle East. Moving Image was conceived to offer a viewing experience with the excitement and vitality of a fair, while allowing moving-image-based artworks to be understood and appreciated on their own terms.

We are very excited to announce the participating artists and galleries/non-profit institutions in Moving Image London 2013:

Participating Artists / Galleries and non-profit institutions (as of Sept 10, 2013)

Karim Al Husseini / Maraya Art Centre, Sharjah, UAE
Josh Azzarella / Mark Moore Gallery, Los Angeles, CA
Janet Biggs / Winkleman Gallery, New York, NY
Sylvie Blocher / Nosbaum & Reding, Luxembourg
Heather Cassils / Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York, NY
Jasmina Cibic / LMAKprojects, New York, NY
Constant Dullaart / Xpo Gallery, Paris, France
Luiz Duva / Galeria Pilar, Sao Paulo, Brazil
Alaa Edris / Maraya Art Centre, Sharjah, UAE
Cliff Evans / Curator’s Office, Washington, DC
Jessica Faiss / Galleri Flach, Stockholm, Sweden
Sheila Gallagher / DODGE Gallery, New York, NY
Noora Geagea / Galleria Huuto, Helsinki, Finland
Nermine Hammam / Maraya Art Centre, Sharjah, UAE
Lauren Kelley / Schroeder Romero, New York, NY
Heta Kuchka / AV-Arkki, Helsinki, Finland
Rollin Leonard / Transfer Gallery, Brooklyn, NY
Annika Larsson /Andréhn-Schiptjenko, Stockholm, Sweden
Zilla Leutenegger / STAMPA, Zurich, Switzerland
Sara Ludy / Klaus Von Nichtssagend Gallery, New York, NY
Simone Lueck / Kopeikin Gallery, Los Angeles, CA
Jonathan Monaghan / Curator’s Office, Washington, DC
Ewa Partum / Galerie M + R Fricke, Berlin, Germany
Adam Putnam / P·P·O·W, New York, NY
Anahita Razmi / Carbon 12, Dubai, UAE
Miia Rinne / AV-Arkki, Helsinki, Finland
Aza Shade / Moving Image Presents, London, UK
Eve Sussman and Rufus Corporation / Winkleman Gallery, New York, NY
Milica Tomic / z2o Galleria | Sara Zanin, Rome, Italy
Gil Yefman / Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York, NY
Maya Zack / Galleria Marie-Laure Fleisch, Rome, Italy

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Still from Rollin Leonard's "360º / 18 Lilia," 2013, Single Channel Video, 0:36 sec.
To be presented at Moving Image London 2013 by Transfer Gallery, New York, NY

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Moving Image London 2013 Curatorial Advisory Committee

Sabin Bors

Founder, curator, and editor

Anti-Utopias Contemporary Art Platform

Cluj-Napoca, Romania

Olesya Turkina

Senior Research Fellow in the Contemporary Art Department, Russian Museum

St. Petersburg, Russia

Julia Draganović

Director, Kunsthalle Osnabrück

Osnabrück, Germany

Jacopo Crivelli Visconti

Writer and Curator

Sao Paulo, Brazil

Alia Swastika

Curator and writer

Yogyarkarta, Indonesia

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The Moving Image Award

Moving Image is delighted to include the second annual Moving Image Award to be presented October 17, 2013, the opening day of the London fair. This year, the Moving Image Award will fund the acquisition of an artwork from the fair for the permanent collection of 53 Art Museum in Guangzhou, China. The award is sponsored by Qiongbo Li, founder of Guangdong Wanpin Culture & Art Development Co., Ltd, in Guangzhou, China.

53 Art Museum is located in Guangzhou City, China, situated in a modern construction designed from repurposed rail car hangars, the site combines the history of the old industrial atmosphere of Guangzhou and the modern art pavilion aesthetic. Featuring 53 galleries within its walls, the museum is dedicated to the experimental, pioneering, cross-border nature of international contemporary art. Under the slogan of "Standing in Guangdong, with eyes on the world", 53 Art Museum devotes itself to promoting contemporary art, especially video art.

Established in 2012 to help incorporate video and film into the permanent collections of art institutions, the inaugural Moving Image Award honored San Francisco collectors Pamela and Richard Kramlich, who have supported contemporary artists working in video, film, and new media through their private collection and through the New Art Trust, a non-profit organization they founded to advance the collection, preservation, exhibition, and understanding of technology-based art forms. The Kramlichs’ dedication has inspired Moving Image to reach out to similarly-minded supporters to expand the inclusion of video, film and new media in museum collections globally. The inaugural Moving Image Award funded an acquisition by Tate for their permanent collection, as selected by Tate's Curator of Film, Stuart Comer.

More info: http://www.moving-image.info/the-moving-image-award/

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Moving Image London 2013

October 17-20, 2013

Online Exclusively at Artsy.net

   

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Moving Image gratefully acknowledges the generous support of our sponors and media partners:

                                                                            

                                

                            

                            

                              

                          

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About Moving Image Art Fair

Moving Image will return to The Bargehouse, October 17-20, 2013, during Frieze Art Fair in London. Located within a short walking distance of Tate Modern, the Bargehouse is just behind the Oxo Tower on the South Bank.

Entry to Moving Image is free and open to the public:

Thursday, October 17, 2-6pm, with an opening reception 6 - 8 pm

Friday and Saturday, October 18 – 19, 11 am – 7 pm

Sunday, October 20, 11 am – 6 pm

Moving Image was conceived to offer a unique viewing experience with the excitement and vitality of a fair, while allowing moving image-based artworks to be understood and appreciated on their own terms. Moving Image London 2013 will feature a selection of international commercial galleries and non-profit institutions presenting single-channel videos, single-channel projections, video sculptures, and other larger video installations.

Founded by Murat Orozobekov and Edward Winkleman of New York's Winkleman Gallery, Moving Image takes place each year in New York and London.
 

Moving Image
October 17–20, 2013

Bargehouse
Oxo Tower Wharf
Bargehouse Street
South Bank
London SE1 9PH, UK

Bargehouse is owned and managed
by Coin Street Community Builders
www.coinstreet.org

For more information, contact Edward Winkleman at (1) 212.643.3152 or contact@moving-image.info. Or visit www.moving-image.info

 

Opening Tonight! Merike Estna's "spinach & banana" @ Winkleman Gallery & in the Curatorial Research Lab, Michael Günzburger's "Bestiary"

Chelsea will be hopping tonight! Hope to see you there!

September 7 - October 12, 2013
Opening: Saturday, September 7, 6-8 PM

Winkleman Gallery is very pleased to present spinach and banana, the first New York solo exhibition of work by Estonian artist Merike Estna. A variation on a project Estna recently presented at the Kumu Art Museum in Tallinn, Estonia, spinach and banana is a multimedia installation incorporating painting, sculpture, found objects, pedestals, and video.

Estna’s paintings have evolved from traditional ideas of picture-making, which were commonplace in the former Soviet Republic of her birth, into more contemporary approaches to abstraction, which she encountered upon entering London’s Goldsmiths College. More recently, however, she has become interested in incorporating performance and moving images in to her installations as an approach toward painting withing an expanded field, including recombining and remixing various art-making techniques. While each installation includes a lot of paintings, she hangs/places them against the walls, or against other painting or furniture, or on their side. There is no single point of view for the paintings or the installation as a whole, and her installations create a very fragile environment, where one must be very alert not to stumble into a video brush up against a painting. It is important for Estna as to leave the consideration of her paintings as open to the viewer as possible, to increase their awareness of how we look at art objects or other things in general.

Using a palette of pastel blues, yellows, and pinks which reference art’s decorative function, her abstractions are made by inscribing rhythmic grooves into the surface of the oil paint. When viewed at an angle, these grooves create a shimmering effect and give the works their structure. Estna here is underscoring the three-dimensionality of the painting itself. In her video works, Estna shows her canvases off of their stretchers, crumpled up in various landscapes (she has said that she takes them on ‘adventures’). Here, the artist humorously reverses painting’s usual role: rather than depicting a landscape, her paintings become part of the landscape. These small videos are actually projected on walls where paintings are usually seen, unlike the actual paintings in the exhibition.

Merike Estna was born in Estonia in 1980. She studied Performance Art at Academia Non Grata, and received her BA in Painting at the Estonian Academy of Art. She moved to London and in 2009 completed a Masters in Art Practice at Goldsmiths College. She has represented Estonia in the following group exhibitions: Prague biennale 3, Prague, Czech Republic; "Estonian Contemporary Art” Baltic States, Kalmar Art Museum, Sweden; “Consequences and Proposals” The Biennale of Young Artists, Tallinn, Estonia; “No Borders” organized by AICA International Association of Art Critics, exhibited in Belgium, Greece and Spain; “Space Oddity” Maison Folie Wazemmes, France, organized by Vilnius Contemporary Art Centre; “Boarder Country” Exhibition of Estonian Contemporary art in Guangzhou, China, organized by Tallinn Art Hall. She was included in “The best 100 (and beyond)” international artists selected for the Italian Flash Art magazine in December 2006, and awarded the Eduard Wiiralt Prize, Estonia, in 2005. She has twice been nominated for the Konrad Mäe Prize for the leading painting or exhibition in Estonia (in 2006 and 2010). Estna’s work has been purchased by KUMU Art Museum of Estonia, the Tartu Art Museum, Estonia, the Loviisa City Collection, Finland and private collections in Europe and Scandinavia. Estna will have a solo exhibition at the KUMU Art Museum in Tallinn, Estonia, opening June 2014. She is represented in Tallinn, Estonia, by Temnikova & Kasela Gallery.

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Michael Günzburger
Bestiary

September 7 - October 12, 2013

Opening: Saturday, September 7, 6-8 PM

In the Curatorial Research Lab, we are very pleased to present Bestiary, a solo exhibition of work by Swiss artist Michael Günzburger. Presented in collaboration with Zurich’s Christinger De Mayo gallery, Bestiary includes a selection of Günzburger’s ongoing series of lithographs created via an actual live animal or the skin of dead animal lying directly on a litho stone. Through this process each hair of the animal is printed as a line and the skin as a whole becomes a paint brush.

Printed in Thomi Wolfenberger‘s esteemed lithography workshop in Zurich, Günzburger’s series deals with related subjects such as hunting, traditional forms of using animal products, or the exaggerated idealization and commercialization of ecological concerns. The Wolfersberger lithographic workshop is an internationally renowned print shop that has been active for four generations in Zurich, and has worked with a wide list of important international artists including Fischli/Weiss, Wolfgang Laib, John Baldessari, Max Ernst, Oskar Kokschka and Henry Moore.

Michael Günzburger considers himself a draughtsman, although his work has no preferred materials but rather a preference for experimentation that lately focuses on a fertile, fetishist fascination for the representation of hair. Born in Bern, Switzerland in 1974, Günzburger has exhibited widely in Europe across the world. His work in many private and public collections, including Credit Suisse Art Collection; Zürcher Kantonalbank At Collection; Collection of the Canton of Zurich; Kunstmuseum Bern; Kunsthaus Zürich; UBS Art Collection; and the Grafic collection of the Swiss National Library. He is represented in Zurch by Christinger De Mayo gallery.

For more information, contact Ed Winkleman at 212.643.3152 or info@winkleman.com

The Paradox of the Artist Activist

Ben Davis had a discussion and book-signing last night for his immensely enjoyable (as well as remarkably both debatable and undeniable for just about everyone who reads it apparently) collection of essays titled 9.5 Theses on Art and Class. In addition to sharing how he came to activism in general and through that how he came to his oft-cited definition of "class" as it applies to art making, Ben shared the stage with four other people who are involved in similar explorations: artists Jennifer Dalton and William Powhida (organizers of the original "#class" show that helped inspire the book), artist Naeem Mohaiemen, and activist and organizer Blithe Riley. 

Their discussion, which was a bit tamer than I would have expected given the individual conversations I've had with 3/5ths of the panel (but then the expectations and protocols of panels these days have a way of taming folks on even the most passionate of topics, as I discovered in Basel over the summer), eventually gave way to a Q&A with the audience. Two of the questions from the audience and their corresponding responses from the panelists resonated with me. 

First was a gentleman who drew a comparison between Lenin and Trotsky and activists today, with the question implying today's activists aren't living up to the example set by the Russians. My immediate thought upon hearing this was the gentleman was conflating activists with revolutionaries, the critical distinction between the two being that revolutionaries are trying to overturn an existing system, whereas activists are trying to work within an existing system. In a democracy, activism is protected by freedom of speech and as such viewed as a right that comes, like most rights, with responsibilities as well. Activism is expected to be conscious of stopping short of throwing the baby out with the bath water. For revolutionaries, tossing the baby is the point. 

Second was a gentleman who asked why struggling artists didn't build security the way immigrant populations do? Artists tend to cluster in inexpensive neighborhoods, the way immigrants do, but they don't pool their resources to buy up the neighborhood and establish community services for themselves the way immigrants do. William Powhida's response to this question (in which he shared that he and several other art world folks are working to purchase a space and open an inexpensive studio program in it) sparked an epiphany (or sorts) for me, though, about a central paradox within the role of "artist activist."

Essentially, it seems to me there are three types of activists: 1) the grassroots community organizer activist who works in relative obscurity fighting for something near and dear to their hearts; 2) the celebrity activist who leverages their name recognition, secured entirely through their particular industry (i.e., something entirely unrelated to their activism), to shine light on causes célèbres like saving the rain forest or rebuilding Haiti; and 3) the artist activist, who is attempting to accomplish both at the same time, that is, to incorporate some cause into their daily practice, which begins in relative obscurity, while working toward fame in their industry via that same daily practice. 

The challenge of that duality was apparent in Powhida's discussion of how the studio program is progressing. Bill's description of the effort included perhaps a half dozen apologies for what the program wasn't going to be able to do (i.e., with regards to helping the local immigrant community) or how it was potentially going to be viewed as exasperating other problems (contributing to the area's gentrification). I said to Bill afterward he can't expect the studio program to be all things to all people...not if he expects it to achieve its central goal, that is. 

Indeed, most celebrity activists didn't hamper their acting, singing, or sports careers with similar concerns. In general, their day jobs are their day jobs and their activism is outside that. You don't see Leo DiCaprio insisting they drop a line about rebuilding Haiti into the script of The Great Gatsby. The two efforts are separate. 

And yet, awareness of the abuse of power and money is a central theme in Powhida's art, so I understand why he struggles with how to not do the same things he criticizes others for in his work. My sense of it, though, is that artists can do more good for the world if they're well known first. Therefore, it's OK to be just a bit selfish about setting up a studio program or simply doing what's needed to ensure your focus on your work is free from the weight of everyone's concerns in the world. I know this may come as a news flash to several people, but no one expects an artist to be perfect...except their dealer, perhaps :-).