Monuments for the USA
April 7-May 14
Opening reception: April 6, 7-8:30 p.m.
Also opening April 6, 7-8:30 p.m.:
Capp Street Project 2005: Tariq Alvi
Anthony Burdin: New Work
CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts
Logan Galleries
1111 Eighth Street, San Francisco
415.551.9211
Gallery hours: Tuesday and Thursday, 11 a.m.-7 p.m.; Wednesday, Thursday, Saturday, 11 a.m.-6 p.m.; closed Sunday, Monday
www.wattis.org
Monuments for the USA
Curated by Ralph Rugoff
Allora & Calzadilla, Tariq Alvi, Janine Antoni, Edgar Arceneaux, Artemio, Robert Beck, Michel Blazy, Monica Bonvicini, Andrea Bowers, Fernando Bryce, Los Carpinteros, Paul Chan, Adam Chodzko, Martin Creed, Enrico David, Jeremy Deller, Thomas Demand, Jessica Diamond, Sam Durant, Shannon Ebner, Elmgreen & Dragset, Meschac Gaba, Anya Gallaccio, Hans Haacke, Susan Hiller, Thomas Hirschhorn, Chris Johanson & Kal Spelletich, Michael Joo, Ilya & Emilia Kabakov, Brad Kahlhamer, Barbara Kruger, Gabriel Kuri, Ken Lum, Jason Meadows, Aleksandra Mir, Liliana Moro, Mike Nelson, Paul Noble, Yoshua Okon, Jennifer Pastor, Kiersten Pieroth, Paola Pivi, Marjetica Potrc, Tobias Putrih, Qiu Zhijie, Rigo 23, Matthew Ronay, Michael Ross, Santiago Sierra, Gary Simmons, Yutaka Sone, Frances Stark, Michael Stevenson, Do-Ho Suh, Torolab, Shirley Tse, Jeffrey Vallance, Mark Wallinger, Olav Westphalen, Xu Zhen and Zhang Huan.
The artists featured in this exhibition present proposals for a monument for the United States of America. Freed from contextual, budgetary or practical constraints, the proposals reflect each artist’s ideas about the type of monument the people of the United States currently need or deserve.
By turns political, satirical, humorous, idealistic and prosaic, these proposals reevaluate and redefine our notions of what monuments can be, and what role they can play in our civic and imaginative life. They range from a Monument to Short-Term Memory (Elmgreen & Dragset) and a Monument to Small Change (Michael Ross), to a proposal that calls for huge loudspeakers to be placed on a mountain in Afghanistan and in a U.S. metropolis, accompanied by microphones allowing reciprocal swearing to be exchanged between citizens of the two countries (Xu Zhen).
Taking the form of drawings, diagrams, maquettes, photocollages, written descriptions, wall paintings, sculptural models or other media, the proposals will be displayed in an exhibition in the CCA Wattis Institute’s Logan Galleries. They will also be reproduced, along with texts by the artists, in a fully illustrated publication that will document the project and that will also be distributed as a kind of mail-order catalog in the hope that some of the monuments will eventually be commissioned and realized with the help of appropriate funding sources. (Available from the CCA Wattis Institute / 415.551.9202)
Capp Street Project: Tariq Alvi (April 7-May 14)
The 2005 Capp Street Project artist in residence Alvi will be presenting new work at the CCA Wattis Institute. Alvi’s collage-like installations map the complexities of contemporary social, emotional and psychological landscapes. Recycling and recontextualizing printed ephemera (club flyers, porn magazines, jewelry catalogs, newspapers, classified ads and maps), Alvi’s fragile-and often ephemeral-works operate at the threshold of private and public life.
Anthony Burdin: New Work (April 7-May 14)
For this exhibition, Burdin is creating a four-room video and mixed media installation.
Articulating a complex and hallucinatory California Gothic, Burdin’s video installations and drawings explore a kinship between fact and fantasy, between the conventions of
pop music and marketing and the obsessive desires of fans.
For further information on the CCA Wattis Institute please visit www.wattis.org.
For press inquiries please contact Kim Lessard at 415.703.9547 or klessard@cca.edu.
Established in 1998, the CCA Wattis Institute serves as a forum for the presentation and discussion of leading-edge local, national and international contemporary culture.
