Week Seven: Exhibitions Any Way You Want Them

by Corinna Kirsch on December 17, 2013 Dream Exhibitions

Included in the Star Wars Modern Dream Exhibition: Jay DeFeo's "The Rose," 1965.  Image courtesy of ARS New York.

Included in the Star Wars Modern Dream Exhibition: Jay DeFeo’s “The Rose,” 1965. Image courtesy of ARS New York.

Dream Exhibitions is a new weekly series that asks artists, writers, curators, and other creative types what as-yet unrealized exhibition they’d like to see. Their response: just two to three sentences. Each week, we publish three to five new submissions. Everyone’s invited, so dream a big dream, and send it our way (Corinna Kirsch, corinna@artfcity.com).

This week’s exhibition’s don’t have much in common: the Death Star, an Internet poet, and Rembrandt. That’s perfect.

When I started Dream X, I wanted to make the submission process pretty easy—it’s open to everyone. (Yes, you are everyone, too.) You can send me an email, but with just a two to three sentence submission, I don’t mind the occasional Tweet. And because I just can’t put on this series every week without coming up with my own dreams, this go-around, I submitted some of my own dreams. Cheers!

John Powers, writer at Star Wars Modern, and artist

 

 

Claire Gilman, Curator at the Drawing Center

My secret passion is and always has been Rembrandt. I love working with contemporary art—and that is where my basic sensibility lies—but if money and space were no object, I would thrill to do an exhibition of the Dutch master. The palpable emotion in his paintings, and the expression his drawings and prints achieve with the simplest line, are as contemporary as anything in my book.

Sofia Leiby, artist, writer, and curator

I’ve ALWAYS wanted to have Steve Roggenbuck perform in a room full of stark, intense minimalist works (like John McCrackens).

Corinna Kirsch, Senior Editor at Art F City

Just a handful of exhibitions I want to put on:

Video Art Year-by-Year: An exhibition showing one video work from each year since 1965—when Nam June Paik screened the first video at a Bleecker Street cafe—shown on the original monitors and displays common to each year. For videos that are no longer around, a text will stand-in for the work.

Best-of the Whitney Biennial: Put out a survey listing all the artists who’ve ever participated in a Whitney Biennial. Art people will vote on which artist is the most-recognizable and least-recognizable artist from each year. Then, we’ll put on an exhibition displaying the best-known and least-known artists from each year. There will be a judge who walks around the room with a Magic 8-ball in order to determine who wins, who’s the best-of every single biennial.

Gunther Uecker: Revolving Disc with Nails, 1964: Back in the day when I worked at a museum, I once found a kinetic sculpture in a museum basement. It was a beautiful, but the motor was slightly broken. Then I found out it was in the Zero Group’s first show in the States. But it’s never been exhibited because, well, museums.

New Media’s Losses: The number of artworks left from any given period is only a fraction of what was actually produced. New media in particular suffers from the constant loss of artworks, through file disintegration, transfer from analog-to-digital media, or accidental deletion. (Nam June Paik’s aforementioned video was never saved to videotape, so our only documentation of it stems from those who attended the first screening.) I’d like to interview artists who’ve lost work, and put out an exhibition and catalog documenting the ones that didn’t make it. For works that survive in fragments, those can be shown in the gallery.

(Okay. So I got carried away.)

Tra Bouscaren and Uwe Moldrzyk, Department of Media Studies, SUNY at Buffalo

Excerpt from a proposal for The Pig-Man Project at the Museum of Natural History, Berlin (a project about genetic modification):

A ring of lights will in turn enclose a lone figure mounted on a plinth reserved for gold medalists in the Olympics, the spots for silver and bronze remaining empty.  From a distance, the “figure” will look like a naked man. Approaching closer it becomes clear that he is actually a pig, altered and transformed through taxidermy so as to appear human.

The spacing and dimensions of this octagonal ring of neon lights surrounding the Pig-Man will mimic the design of the “Octagon” cage as used by the UFC (Ultimate Fighting Championship).  Representing the fight for life, the Pig-Man will thus be illuminated by a ring of lights that implies his own eventual extinction.

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