Dennis Oppenheim, Attempt to Raise Hell, 1974-1985, clothed figure with cast aluminum head and hands, cast iron bell, motor. Museum purchase with matching funds from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Attempt to Raise Hell
MCASD Downtown, Jacobs Building
July 12 through September 27, 2009
The second in a two-part collection exhibition series, Attempt to Raise Hell follows the presentation of Weighing and Wanting in MCASD's La Jolla galleries in the fall of 2008. The exhibition's title is taken from Dennis Oppenheim's mechanical installation of the same name-featured in the exhibition -- in which a seated, silver-headed marionette wearing a dark suit rings a bell by suddenly hitting it with its forehead. This sense of humor, poignancy, and the unexpected can be seen in many of the works in Attempt to Raise Hell, which features large-scale installation pieces that showcase the architectural spaces of MCASD's Jacobs Building. Including works by Vito Acconci, María Fernanda Cardoso, Russell Crotty, Lewis deSoto, James Drake, Charles Gaines, Ann Hamilton, and Paul Kos, among others, the exhibition highlights the Museum's pioneering history and ongoing commitment to showing, commissioning, and collecting installation art.
For most of its history, MCASD has been a primary patron of artists who make work that is not easily accommodated or commodified. The works in Attempt to Raise Hell range from poetic meditations on life, death, and religion to political responses that have a contemporary resonance beyond specific historical events.
In conjunction with the exhibition, MCASD has commissioned San Diego artist Jim Skalman to create a unique, site-specific work. Skalman, Professor and Chair of the Department of Art and Design at Point Loma Nazarene University, is known for his subtly subversive environmental sculptures and will create a new installation in response to the Museum's galleries.
Attempt to Raise Hell is sponsored by a generous contribution from Drs. Stacy and Paul Jacobs.
Mixed martial arts is a sport with a passionate and expanding audience. Octagon (named for the eight-sided cage in which the fighters compete) presents photographs by Kevin Lynch, who was given unprecedented access to document the Ultimate Fighting Championship mixed martial artists, both ringside and behind the scenes. The centerpiece of the exhibition is a monumental grid of before-and-after photographs of the competitors prior to and following their matches. Using a globe light in order to best emulate locker-room lighting, Lynch's portraits of the fighters illustrate both their intensity and their vulnerability.
Also included with this exhibition to provide context is a DVD of an Ultimate Fighting Championship event [UFC Fight Night (UFN 7)] that occurred at San Diego's Miramar Marine Corps base on December 13, 2006. Octagon is accompanied by an illustrated exhibition catalogue featuring a foreword by playwright David Mamet and an essay by art critic Dave Hickey.
Michael Borremans, In the Louvre - the House of Opportunity, 2003, pencil, watercolor, and white ink on paper. Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Automatic Cities: The Architectural Imaginary in Contemporary Art
MCASD La Jolla
September 26, 2009 through January 31, 2010
The "architectural imaginary" describes architecture in its broadest sense, comprising images of cities drawn from collective experience and imagination. Hailing from 11 countries, each of the 14 artists and artist collaboratives who contributed work to Automatic Cities engage the psychological and sociopolitical aspects of architecture through their work, mapping the pervasive influence of the architectural imaginary on contemporary visual art in an international context.
Automatic Cities is organized into four thematic groupings. Architecture as language features work by Matthew Buckingham, Ann Lislegaard, and Paul Noble; architecture and memory includes installations by Saskia Olde Wolbers, Hiraki Sawa, and Rachel Whiteread; architecture as model encompasses installations by Michaël Borremans, Los Carpinteros, Catharina van Eetvelde, and Katrin Sigurdardóttir; while the theme of surveillance is explored by Jakob Kolding, Sarah Oppenheimer, Julie Mehretu, and Matthew Ritchie.
The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue featuring an essay and entries by exhibition curator Robin Clark and an essay by Giuliana Bruno, Professor at Harvard University and a critically acclaimed author on visual art and architecture.
Joseph Cornell, Pink Chateau, 1944, mixed media. Courtesy of a private collector.
Duchamp and Cornell: Museums in Miniature
MCASD La Jolla
September 26, 2009 through January 31, 2010
Museums in Miniature explores the use of collage, assemblage, and staged tableaux by Marcel Duchamp and Joseph Cornell as plays on the notion of an exhibition space. Evocative juxtapositions, absurdities, and rebuses abound in Cornell’s work, demonstrating the enduring influence of Duchamp’s practice, and of Surrealism more broadly, during the second half of the 20th century. Duchamp will be represented by MCASD’s The Green Box (1934) a compendium of manuscript notes, drawings, and photographs documenting the development of his major work, The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, and by a version of his Boîte-en-valise (1942-54), which contains miniature replicas of three of Duchamp’s readymades (mass-produced goods appropriated by Duchamp as artworks) and 68 printed reproductions of other works by the artist. The box is assembled in such a way that various parts slide out, fold out, or lift out for display to create what Duchamp described as a “miniature museum,” or a portable retrospective of his oeuvre to that point.
The exhibition also showcases four box constructions donated to the museum by the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation. The small format of Cornell’s box sculptures implies intimacy, while the worn quality of his materials (torn maps, ticket stubs) suggests both nostalgia and transience. The rounded arches of Untitled (Grand Hôtel des Alpes) (1957) function as architectural fragments that refer to a monumental structure, while the elaborate fenestration of Pink Chateau (1944) seems the perfect backdrop for an epic ballet (both works require imagination on the part of the viewer to be completed). Duchamp’s “miniature museums” are ironic, polemic, and humorous; Cornell’s are richly textured and extraordinarily poetic. Together the works by Duchamp and Cornell serve as a prelude to the exhibition, Automatic Cities: The Architectural Imaginary in Contemporary Art on view concurrently in the adjacent galleries.
Tara Donovan’s sculptural installations are based on the physical properties and capabilities of a single accumulated material. She uses prosaic items including electrical cable, adding machine paper, straight pins, paper plates, and toothpicks. These materials are arranged in a manner that sometimes mimics the organization of geological or biological forms. Through this subtle and remarkably affecting presentation, drinking straws may suggest clouds and plastic cups may call to mind a brittle winter landscape. Part of the intrigue of Tara Donovan’s practice lies in the way she is able to present a mass of unaltered, simple objects that do not disguise what they are while simultaneously suggesting a range of richly poetic associations.
Organized by the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston, this is the first major museum survey of Donovan’s work. The San Diego presentation of Tara Donovan is organized by MCASD Senior Curator Dr. Stephanie Hanor.
Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego
T 858 454 3541 / F 858 454 6985 / info@mcasd.org
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