Small Museum for the American Metaphor
September 27–November 30, 2014
Lecture performance by Hector Bourges: October 29, 7:30pm
Benjamin Seror: The Marsyas Hour
November 18, 25 & December 2, 7:30pm
REDCAT
631 West 2nd Street
Los Angeles, CA 90012
Hours: Tuesdays–Sundays noon–6pm
Admission free
Small Museum for the American Metaphor
Opening: September 27; curator talk at 4pm
REDCAT gallery curator Ruth Estévez invited the Belgian architect Kersten Geers to develop the exhibition, which focuses on themes that are clearly evident in the architectural work he creates with his firm, OFFICE Kersten Geers and David Van Severen. The visual argument in this exhibition is that there is a certain architectonic idea that dwells on the celebration of Endlessness as mythicized in the American West. The metaphor is the base for an architecture that blurs the distinction between building and object, collapsing the different scales. It is an architecture that celebrates the fiction of the wide open and seeks to re-evaluate/reinterpret the world as a gigantic interior. In that context, a successful intervention is able to define hierarchies, carve out places, and make shared points of reference. The exhibition, much in the tradition of showcasing objects in a defined space, such as a cabinet, collects artworks, architectural models, drawings and other elements that consciously fade the distinction between object and representation.
The exhibition features works from artists, designers and architects including John Baldessari, Baukuh, Koenraad Dedobbeleer, Stefano Graziani, JOHNSTONMARKLEE, Rita McBride, Jonathan Muecke, Jonathan Olivares, Manfred Pernice, OFFICE KGDVS, Bas Princen, Ettore Sottsass, Saul Steinberg, Harald Thys & Jos de Gruyter, Richard Venlet, Christopher Williams, Ed Ruscha, Michaël Van den Abeele, Peter Wächtler, two new commissioned installations by Pieter Vermeersch and Valerie Mannaerts, as well as models of past and present architectures of the “big box.”
Major support provided by Brenda R. Potter. Funded in part with generous support from Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the Flanders State of the Arts and the Italian Cultural Institute of Los Angeles. Special thanks to Centro Studi Poltronova and École Polytechnique Fédérale de Laussane (EPFL).
Lecture performance by Héctor Bourges
In this lecture/performance, Héctor Bourges, a member of the Mexico City-based artistic collective Teatro Ojo, combines a series of gestures, images and historical events that have served to create the drafting of a “ghost contract”: the basis for a constant building up and knocking down of Mexico’s national project. Bourges explores different forms of staging and performance (nahualism, masks, metamorphosis, ventriloquism, etc.) to reveal the strategies of political powers, and to depict the double standard discourse of politics, always fraught with false hopes and hidden secrets.
Benjamin Seror: The Marsyas Hour
Benjamin Seror’s performances often narrate long, improvised stories, inspired by phantoms of literature, art history and everyday adventures, taking speech as the principal subject and tool. The Marsyas Hour is a script of a TV pilot show that recounts the everyday life of the Mount Olympus through the eyes of Marsyas, developed in public, during a series of performances. Imagined as a documentary told by Marsyas himself, each performance presents aspects of the dark times he was living in and his relationship to magic. During the performances, Seror will describe the TV show in detail, as a foundation for the script that will be developed after the transcription of the live performances and, as such, the process of performing precedes the act of writing.
This project is supported by the American Residency program of Institut Francais.
About the Gallery at REDCAT focuses on experimentation through new commissions that often mark the first major presentation by the featured artists in Los Angeles. Employing temporary structures and dynamic installations, the exhibition formats are flexible and continually reformulated to allow for a range of spatial and temporal possibilities. Through its annual series of exhibitions, publications, talks and other public programs, the Gallery highlights concepts and critical discourses that connect art with other fields and disciplines.
