I received the following information about an exhibition in an email from e-flux. It sounds brilliant!
Explosion! The Legacy of Jackson Pollock
Fundació Joan Miró
www.fundaciomiro-bcn.org
Curator: Magnus af Petersens
Kazuo Shiraga painted with
his feet, suspended by ropes above the canvas; Andy Warhol or his
assistants urinated on the canvas; Shozo Shimamoto hurled paint-filled
glass bottles at his paintings, and Niki de Saint Phalle fired a rifle
at
her panels that she had prepared with balloons of paint under layers of
plaster. Explosion! The Legacy of Jackson Pollock features works
by
some 35 artists from the 1940s on.
After the Second World
War, many artists wanted to start from scratch by attacking painting,
which
was seen to represent artistic conventionality. Explosion! takes
off
where modernism ends, when it was so ripe that it was on the verge of
exploding. Which it did, in the form of a variety of new ways of making
art. Practically every door was opened with an aggressive kick, and a
new
generation of artists began seeing themselves not as painters or
sculptors
but simply as artists, who regarded all materials and subjects as
potential
art. That is how the American artist and writer Allan Kaprow, the man
who
invented the word "happening," described the situation in 1956 in his
now
legendary essay "The Legacy of Jackson Pollock." Even if doors were
opened
to all techniques, much of the new art—happenings, performance and
conceptualism—sprang from new approaches to painting. There was a
development, a shift of focus from painting as an art object and as
representation to the process behind the work, to the ideas that
generate
art, and to performative aspects.
"In Explosion! we
want to explore the performative and conceptual elements in painting,
and
the painterly elements in conceptualism and performance," says
exhibition
curator Magnus af Petersens, curator at Moderna Museet in
Stockholm.
The exhibition follows a theme that runs from
Jackson Pollock's drip paintings, via a Cageian fascination for chance
as a
method for creating art, to performance and conceptual approaches. It
also
presents the Japanese artist group Gutai (1954–1972), which operated
in radical ways in the borderland between painting and performance,
anticipating many later artistic practices and strategies such as
conceptualism, land art and installation. In Europe they exhibited
together
with artists from the nebulous artist group Zero, also featured in
Explosion! with works by Günther Uecker and Otto Piene.
The
geographical scope of the artists featured in Explosion!
is an attempt to put the American-European art canon in a broader
context. The exhibition comprises paintings, photos, videos,
performance,
dance and sound works, instructions and pieces that invite audience
participation. Since the exhibition includes action rather than focusing
exclusively on painting, performance and documentations of performance
are
an important part of the material that is presented, not least early
footage of Jackson Pollock and Yves Klein in their performance-like
painting acts, which have provoked many artistic comments, including
works
by Lynda Benglis and Janine Antoni, who are also featured in
Explosion! Although this group exhibition is historical, it
adheres
to no particular style or ism, and is not confined to a geographically
limited art scene; rather, it reveals the kinship between apparently
unrelated artistic approaches.
Explosion! The Legacy of
Jackson Pollock was produced by Moderna Museet and adapted by
Fundació Joan Miró.
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