Endurance: The Information 1916-1994
Leedy-Voulkos Art Center is pleased to present Endurance: The Information, a travelling exhibition curated by Exit Art, a non-profit center for contemporary art in New York. The art historical exhibition represents a rare opportunity to consider important time-based artworks by a selection of highly significant artists. These artworks, existing now only in the form of documentation, have had a tremendous and lasting impact on the field of contemporary visual art and performance.
Endurance: The Information is an international survey tracing the work of twentieth century visual and performance artists, whose individual and collective works test the physical, mental and spiritual endurance of the body. The documentation included derives from performance, body art action, and conceptual art pieces, executed primarily from the 1960s to the 1990s.
This exhibition provides a rare opportunity to consider a wealth of ephemeral, time-based artworks, which have had a tremendous and lasting impact on the field of contemporary visual art and performance. While many are less familiar, a few of these actions have been absorbed by the art historical canon, gaining infamy as they are passed on to new generations of art students through text-book accounts (in most cases there were few witnesses to the actual actions/performances.) Works like Chris Burden’s Shoot have become part of our personal and collective consciousness, preserved in forms as much based in imagination as in fact. Perhaps precisely because these exist only as documentation - as information - they transcend time and place, ultimately to exist as powerful ideas we carry within our minds. By presenting a broad spectrum of related activities, Endurance creates a larger context in which to understand these actions and passes on a more complete picture of their scope.
The bulk of these works grew out of a political and social climate characterized by the advent of the atomic age and the Vietnam War. They directly reflect a sensibility, emerging in the late 1960s and early 1970s, of resistance toward saleable objects - a resistance directed specifically at the "art system" but, on a broader level, at the capitalist market economy in general. Drawing on art historical precedents, from pictures and texts of Dada performances (first available in the U.S. in the 50s), to the performative physicality of Jackson Pollock’s "action paintings," these conceptual and performance based pieces were an attempt to re-connect with the fundamentals of existence and to privilege the personal and social experience of process over product.
In using one’s own body as the site for artmaking, the artist becomes both subject and object - the painter and the "canvas" itself - enacting and acted upon. Returning, in effect, to the source, these artists sought to create honest, direct and immediate statements and to re-center art directly within the sphere of everyday life. The actions documented in Endurance reflect artists challenging the limits of art but, most importantly, challenging the limits of their own beings and wills. As Burden wrote in 1975, "My art is an examination of reality. By setting up aberrant situations, my art focuses on a higher reality, in a different state. I live for those times." If in retrospect some of these actions seem extreme or absurd, they nonetheless represent an important quest to find sensorial and spiritual meaning in a society tending to propagate distraction and disengagement. Becoming aware of or revisiting this work seems highly relevant as this quest continues into the 21st century.
Curators: Jeanette Ingberman and Papo Colo, Co-Founders/Directors, Exit Art, New York City
Project Coordinator: Kate Hackman
Artists featured (many by multiple works): Marina Abramovic, Bas Jan Ader, Vito Acconci, Eleanor Antin, Skip Arnold, Judith Barry, Joseph Beuys, Chris Burden, Papo Colo, Arthur Cravan, Valie Export, Bob Flanagan and Sheree Rose, Sherman Fleming, Terry Fox, Gilbert and George, Geoffrey Hendricks, Tehching Hsieuh, Kim Jones, Yves Klein. Barry Le Va, Tom Marioni, Paul McCarthy, Linda Montano, Charlotte Moorman, Yoko Ono, Dennis Oppenheim, Orlan, Gina Pane, Pearl, Rachel Rosenthal, Jill Scott, Carolee Schneeman, Barbara Smith, Bonnie Sherk, Stelarc, Mierle L. Ukeles, T.R. Uthco.
Danger: The Video Program
In conjunction with Endurance: The Information, Leedy-Voulkos Art Center will present Danger: The Video Program. Including eleven videos by nine artists, the program provides a real-time complement to the photographs and documentation presented in Endurance, which explores the work of 20th century visual and performance artists whose works test the physical, mental and spiritual endurance of the body. Many of the videos featured in Danger are also documentary in nature, recording artists’ actions and performances which involved risking their own bodies by placing themselves in dangerous situations.
Highlights in Danger include Chris Burden’s highly influential Shoot, 1971, which features Burden being shot in his shoulder and his psychological response to the event; Skip Arnold’s Hood Ornament, 1992, where the artist portrays himself as a hood ornament on a truck, displacing the human body from the shelter of a car and reversing the role of machinery and man; Gordon Matta-Clark’s Clockshower, 1973, one of the artist’s remarkable interventions that questioned the human landscape of our urban environment; Allen Tombello’s Emergency Transcendence Series, 2001, which documents Tombello getting rescued from a mountain; and David Hall’s "living pyrotechnic" performances recorded in Metaphysical and E=MC2. Also featured are works by David Leslie, Jessica Buege, and Ximena Cuevas.
Danger: The Video Program will be available for viewing on monitors in the gallery during regular hours. A special screening of the video program in its entirety will take place Saturday, September 22, 2-5p.m.
Curator: Jodi Hanel