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Francesco Jodice @ Museo del Prado

Francesco Jodice, San Paolo City tellers 2006, still from Video A video-installation and short film present a ‘human atlas’ of the Prado with the spectator as the principal focus

The Museo del Prado pays tribute to its visitors through the work of the Italian artist Francesco Jodice

From 5 October 2011 to 8 January 2012 The Prado by Francesco Jodice will present visitors with a visual testimony to the presence of those who, like them, have ‘inhabited’ its galleries. Through the disinterested participation of more than 400 visitors from all over the world, Francesco Jodice (born Naples, 1967) has created two works – a video-installation and a five-minute film – that will be shown at the Prado in a tribute to its visitors. The project by this highly regarded Italian artist has been made possible through the generous sponsorship of Acciona, a Benefactor Member of the Museo del Prado since 2007.

Francesco Jodice’s work explores the relationship between human beings and the urban space. Within this relationship he considers that scarcely a trace has been left of the hundreds of thousands of visitors who have admired museum collections over the course of the centuries. With the present project, entitled The Prado by Francesco Jodice, the artist has aimed to highlight the mark left by their presence, paying tribute to the spectator’s ‘ecstasy’. In Jodice’s words: “the most important and remarkable aspect of this phenomenon is the accumulation of emotion, desire, reflection, joy, rage or silence that each person experiences inside the museum-environment as well as the base for the construction of an archive of the spectator’s presence”.

In order to construct this moving ‘human atlas’ of the Prado, Jodice has created a video-installation that will be projected in the niches of the “Ionic Galleries” of the Museum’s ground floor, which have views over the Paseo del Prado. These five synchronised projections will record the disinterested participation of more than 400 visitors to the Museum whose portraits in movement were captured full-length in 1:1 human scale and in close-up on Jodice’s lens, reflecting the tension caused by the act of filming. With the projection of this ‘photography in movement’ filmed on HD, Jodice has aimed to record the memory of those individuals’ presence and thus produce a witnessing of the visitors who daily experience the effect of the Museum’s collections, constructing a ‘visual encyclopaedia’ of part of that great mass of humanity that keeps the Museum and its works alive. For Jodice, “[...] the faces become the Spanish and international physiognomic history of the social landscape of the Museum”, given that “in this installation the spectator becomes a work of art.” The video-installation will also be seen at night by visitors or passers-by in the area of the Paseo del Prado that is flanked by the gallery showing the projection. As a result, another interesting aspect of the project will be that of sharing this fragment of the Museum’s life with the street outside following one of Jodice’s obsession: to ‘explode’ the Museum and the possibilities of public spaces as a ‘protesys’ of the traditional exhibition areas.

In addition to the video-installation, Jodice has made a short, five-minute film that will be shown in a connecting area of the building located on the first floor next to the Goya galleries. The film reflects the everyday relationship between visitors to the Prado and its collections. Jodice ‘fuses’ the visitor with the work of art, showing their immobile portraits (couples, families, students etc.,) in a tense and moving dialogue that once again makes the spectator rather than the work of art the protagonist.

The Prado by Francesco Jodice, also at the cinema From 7 October a shorter version of the film will be shown in 400 cinemas around Spain also thanks to the sponsorship of Acciona. This new initiative will also confront the cinema spectators with the spectators and works of the Museum. According the artist’s own words: “[...] the work of art thus functions like a virus infecting a space traditionally dedicated to film, obliging a public not necessarily used to art to come face to face with it.” Francesco Jodice

Francesco Jodice, San Paolo 2006 Born in Naples in 1967, Francesco Jodice lives and works in Milan. He was a founder member of the Italian Multiplicity group, an international network and experimental forum of architects and artists. He is also a member of other art groups such as Zapruder that focus on issues of research, urban and socio-cultural development, geo- politics, technology, and art and its influence on the urban environment and on society within it. Jodice is professor of Urban Visual Anthropology at the NABA Master in Art and Curatorial studyings and professor of Photography Cinema and New media Department at the New Academy of Fine Arts, both in Milan. In 2008 he worked with the United Nations on the 60th Anniversary of the Declaration of Human Rights. Jodice’s activities encompass architecture, photography and video art and his work explores the involvement and location of the human being within the urban space.

His projects have been exhibited at Documenta in Kassel (2001) , the Venice Biennal (2003), the MAMbo in Bologna (2010), the MUSAC in León, the ICP Triennial of Photography and Video in New York, the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid (2007), the São Paulo Art Biennial and the Tate Modern, London (2006), and Liverpool Biennial (2004). Jodice’s work is represented in various European collections including those of the Reina Sofía in Madrid the Museion in Bozen and the Unicredit Group collection in Italy.

Michael Dean's Acts of Grass @ Serpentine

Specially commissioned for the Serpentine 2011 Pavillion designed by Peter Zumthor, the performance "Act of Grass" by Michael Dean took place in the rarefied atmosphere of a night in the park.

A total of fifty guests were ceremoniously taken, one by one, by fifty performers into the pavilion of the Serpentine Gallery in London. Upon entering from the fresh autumn evening, each performer handed their guest a half booklet with a text. We were guided to our seats around the walls of the space. Each performer was seated on a white stool facing their guest, the space harmoniously completed; fifty facing fifty.

It took around ten or fifteen minutes to complete, all done in religious silence, not by command or anyone's indication but simply and naturally, the atmosphere was held by the pavilion, the fresh and calm evening and the curiosity of the guests on the outcome of the performance. Lights illuminated the position where each couple, performer and guest, were seated.

Four female models were standing at the four sides of the internal rectangle of the Pavilion with their own booklet in hands, dressed in dark evening dress. They were facing the internal garden and assumed a position like a sort of priestess in a pagan ceremony

It was while all this took place that I noticed my silent performer mirroring my gestures and position but in a delicate, ethereal slow motion. Each performer was creating this personal initial dialogue with their guest in this same way. We were ready. Silence. I felt like something should start ,but the silence continued for a few more minutes, charging the atmosphere with intimate embarrassment, quite an achievement in this large space, though helped by the careful and seductive use of lighting.

I decided to have a look at the booklet and start to really understand the meaning of the text in it. All at once the performers, started to read the booklet, voices lowered, even so it was as if my performer was gently whispering in my ears. All fifty performers, mostly young women, whispered the same text, joining as one voice, the intimacy of my personal performer, enhanced by the unusual sound of the grouped voices not only talking to you but really talking to your inner persona.

The text was repetitive and reflecting the one to one situation: "The virtuosity of the deception for dependence and parts .. and dependence... and equal sequence..." the words and their sounds formed their own music with the consonants and vowels obviously chosen both for their sound and their meaning.

The first page of the text is all about "dependence, parts, sequence, equal, hands, distance between two" focusing on the beginning of a dialogue. The reading goes on for twenty minutes or so in a continuous whisper of words, pauses, accents, sentences and breaths; The voices were reading in near unison, though the difference elongating the natural length of each word, this effect made the one to one dialogue even more magical.

When a first part of the text finished the last sentence is all about leaves and leaving, departure and distance, and when the last sentence "Having or having left" was said it took few more seconds for the pavilion to regain the absolute silence of the opening. One or two minutes of silence and one by one the four tall model priestesses read a piece one word at a time from each individual; the words were “intimacy" "field" "difference" "symmetry" and finally "symmetry of intimacy".

As the four voices read the feeling of a closing ceremony, though more silent, more discrete, more intimate and again the words led a harmonious coming together in an elegant and delicate gesture of a deeper communication between humans.
Michael Dean's performance is a delicate yet powerful work on relationships between space, people, text, reading and voices that takes the participants through a journey that explores your perceptions of things.

Michael Dean, Born in 1977 in Newcastle Upon Tyne, Lives and works in London
Education
1998-2001Goldsmiths College, London, Fine Art
Selected Solo Exhibitions
2011 Herald St, London, Kunstverein, Freiburg, Germany, The Colour of Public, Kim? Centre for Contemporary Art, Riga, Our Daily Permanence, Fruit, Flowers and clouds: MAK, Austrian Museum of Applied Art, Vienna
2010 Supportico Lopez, Berlin, Germany, Symmetry of Intimacy, Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle, UK, INDEPENDENT, New York, Tolerance, Scaramouche, New York
2009 Dialogue, FRAME/Frieze, London under the auspices of Supportico Lope, Near to no attention to fears and without anything between the opposite of tears, works|projects, Bristol
2008 Her body in the same place as my body, Alessandro De March, Milan, You cant reflect in the distance and you don’t reflect distances towards you closing, Feurig59, Berlin
2007 All the trees bend this way, Guestroom, London

Father of Conceptual Art Joseph Kosuth lands in Mayfair

London Mayfair Gallery Sprüth Magers hosts Joseph Kosuth’s site specific project “The Mind’s Image of itself #3’ a play on architecture and mind’. The show will run until the 1 October. The show is a dialogue between the very particular gallery space and the philosophical mind of one of the great contemporary artist of our time. Joseph Kosuth born in 1945 in Toledo, Ohio is considered the father of Conceptual Art. Educated in three American art schools in the early sixties, Kosuth studied Anthropology and Philosophy at New School for Social Research in 1971. His passion for philosophy is evident throughout his long and successful carrier. Philosophical concepts take the shape of artworks in a dialogue between the media, the concept and the viewer. His use of objects, neon lights and images translate into sentences and quotes of meaningful philosophical concepts. Kosuth plays an elegant exercise that delicately indicate at the obvious meaning of things: A FIVE COLOR SENTENCE, FOUR COLORS WORDS, SUBJECT SUBJECTIVE AND OBJET OBJECTIVE are all neon lights made of different colors, are just few examples of some of his well known works.

The special project Joseph Kosuth presents in London is particularly appreciated because he reflects both on the architecture of the London gallery space and on a suggested architecture of the mind. Within the two rooms of the gallery space, Kosuth re-traces, in an allegory, the physical context of the exhibition itself, its walls, doors and windows. Simultaneously he presents the various meanings that the space, as an architectural object and a social/culture interface in play, reflects.

Again here we have the subtle game that Kosuth produces in his artworks, The object, the space, the meaning, the context and the viewers. This show uses the internal architecture of a building as a starting point for this intellectual exercise.

The installation is composed of an off register, a 1:1 wallpapered line drawing facsimile of the gallery rooms themselves. These aspects are articulated by the insertion of a fragmented intellectual discourse made up of more than 150 meticulously selected quotes by diverse thinkers from a variety of sources put in play as wall texts throughout the two gallery rooms. Wittgenstein, Voltaire, Virginia Wolf, Bertrand Russel, Yeats, Roland Barthes, Coleridge, David Hume and many others enlighten the minds of the viewers.

The artist pairs the image of the Gallery space with that of a multitude of voices and associations constructing an interior contemplative space where readers, as visitors, enter and dwell in the architecture of a house of ideas.

The work is part of a series which was first conceived for an exhibition at the Palazzo Bembo, presented at this year’s 54th Venice Biennale, followed by an artist project which will feature in Frieze Magazine’s 20th Anniversary Issue this September.

Joseph Kosuth is credited with initiating appropriation strategies, language based works and the use of photography in the 1960’s. His work and writings consistently explore the production and role of language and meaning within art. This over forty year inquiry into the relation of language to art has taken the form of installations, museum exhibitions, public commissions and publications throughout Europe, the Americas and Asia, including numerous Documenta in Kassel and Venice Biennales. His works are in most museum collections in the United States, Europe, Australia and Asia. Awards include the Brandeis Award, 1990, the Frederick Weisman Award, 1991, the Venice Biennale Menzione d'Onore, 1993, and the Chevalier de l'ordre des Arts et des Lettres from the French government in 1993. Kosuth was awarded a Cassandra Foundation Grant in 1968, at the age of 23, as the choice of Marcel Duchamp one week before he died. In 1999, in honour of his work, the French government issued a 3.00-franc postage stamp in Figeac. In 2001, he received the Laurea Honoris Causa doctorate in Philosophy and Letters from the University of Bologna. In 2003, Kosuth was awarded the Austrian Republic’s highest honour for accomplishments in science and culture, the Decoration of Honour in Gold. In 2009, Kosuth’s exhibition entitled ‘ni apparence ni illusion’, an installation work throughout the 12th century walls of the Louvre Palace, opened at the Musée du Louvre in Paris and will become a permanent work in October 2012. His work on the façade of the Council of State of the Netherlands will be inaugurated in October this year and he is currently working on a permanent work for the four towers of the façade of the Biblioteque Nationale in Paris, expected to be completed in 2012.