Beginning with a Bang!
On view from September 28, 2007 to January 5, 2008
Gallery Hours: Wednesday – Saturday 12-6 PM
Exhibition Opening: Friday, September 28, 6:30-9:00 PM
Visual Arts: Curatorial dialogue with participating artists: 6:30 PM
Opening reception: 7:30 – 9:00 PM
Free Admission
About the exhibition:
Guest curated by Victoria Noorthoorn, the exhibition is divided into two distinct sections.
The first, a selection of action-based projects by artists working in Buenos Aires; the second, a documentary section exploring the rich historical foundations that link these projects to the 1960s and 1970s.
Taken together, the projects included in the exhibition formulate politics of intimacy. They attempt to offer a poetic vision of reality in which fiction, and in some cases humor, are the catalysts for creating new situations or unforeseen visions. The ideal of inserting a poetic gesture into a highly structured system reveals resistance; it also signals the will to construct the own utopia and affirms a local, community-oriented focus that operates by generating its own spaces of legitimacy and effecting decisive transformations in our ways of seeing.
Along the way, the contemporary artist’s gestures and actions explore the limit of the author-subject, which is either split, merged with the object or subject studied, or transformed into an other self; authorship is altered and dissolved in the process of exploration. Like their precursors, they locate the artistic practice in life.
The historical section is organized as a timeline from 1956 to 1976 that focuses on immediate actions and performing gestures of destruction and dematerialization that sought to confront and transform the art system during this time. In the timeline, the viewers will be able to access information on specific gestures and projects by Alberto Greco, Marta Minujín, Roberto Jacoby, the mass media art group (Eduardo Costa and Roberto Jacoby, Raúl Escari, and Juan Risuleo), Pablo Suárez, and Federico Manuel Peralta Ramos among others.
The contemporary section presents installations, performance projects and films that together propose a “politics of intimacy,” by, for the most part, mid-generation artists, with the exception of Navarro and Tartaglia (emerging) and Jacoby (from a previous generation): Marina De Caro; Ana Gallardo; Graciela Hasper; Roberto Jacoby, in collaboration with Syd Krochmalny; Fabio Kacero; Fernanda Laguna; Patricio Larrambebere; Eduardo Navarro; Leandro Tartaglia; and Judi Werthein.
Exhibition catalogue available through Harvard University Press.
Upcoming Public Programs related to the exhibition:
Curatorial dialogue with participating Artists
Friday, September 28, 6:30 p.m.
Vis-à-vis: Dialogues between Artists and Curators from the Western Hemisphere with Analia Segal and Deborah Cullen
Thursday , October 25, 6:00 p.m.
This program is co-organized with El Museo del Barrio.
Artist’s talk with Roberto Jacoby
Wednesday, October 10, 6:00 p.m.
Panel Discussion: Alex Alberro and Ana Longoni on “Destruction in Argentine Art from the 1960s and 1970s”
Wednesday, November 14, 6:00 p.m.
Reservations are required
Please email culture@americas-society.org or call (212) 277 8359
We gratefully acknowledge the following donors for their generous support of Beginning with a Bang! From Confrontation to Intimacy: An Exhibition of Argentine Contemporary Artists, 1960 2007: Teresa de Bulgheroni; Banco Hipotecario; Falcon Properties; Fundación arteBA; Fundación Exportar, Secretary of Trade and International Economic Relations, Argentina; HaudenschildGarage, Eloisa and Chris Haudenschild; Pinta-Art, LLC; and Alejandro Quentin.
About Us
Americas Society is the premier forum dedicated to education, debate and dialogue in the Americas. Our mission is to foster an understanding of the contemporary political, social and economic issues confronting Latin America, the Caribbean and Canada, and to increase public awareness and appreciation of the diverse cultural heritage of the Americas and the importance of the inter-American relationship. Americas Society unites opinion leaders to exchange ideas and develop solutions to the challenges facing the Americas today.
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