Please join us at Kunstverein for Meet Marlow Moss, an insert of Marlow Moss’s ‘Composition with Double Line and Blue Square’ (1934). This special event takes place Saturday 18 May from 5–8 pm and features a repeated performance by Dutch actor Martijn Nieuwerf, once at 6 pm and once at 7 pm.
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On this occasion, Kunstverein Publishing is proud to launch the publication ‘Marlow Moss’ written by Riet Wijnen, designed by Marc Hollenstein.
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‘Larry Bell and Sarah Crowner, Meet Marlow Moss’ opened on April 20 and runs until June 22.
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Larry Bell and Sarah Crowner, Meet Marlow Moss is made possible with the support of Stichting Niemeijer Fonds; Stadsdeel Zuid; Het Amsterdams Fonds voor de Kunst and Kunstverein’s (Gold) members. With thanks to De Vleeshal, Middelburg

Larry Bell and Sarah Crowner
20 April–22 June 2013
Meet Marlow Moss, an insert by Marlow Moss
18 May–22 June 2013
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Opening 20 April, 5–8 pm
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Kunstverein continues its research into alternative retrospectives with a new mise-en-scène by Sarah Crowner containing very recent and lesser-known works by Larry Bell, and an historical insert by Marlow Moss.
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The three protagonists:
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Larry Bell (b. 1939 in Chicago, lives and works in Taos and LA) walked around Venice California in the early sixties with a camera attached to his back, a bio-feedback chip in his hat and a trigger mechanism connected to his earlobes. Alpha waves emitted by a body in a state of wellbeing would set off the photo-taking process and eventually lead to a series of blurred pictures capturing perception on the move, observation in its most random form. Larry Bell, probably known best for his minimal glass sculpture, (the cubes were first exhibited at Pace Gallery in 1965) is a ‘spontaneous and improvisational, investigator of improbable visuals by improbably means’. Each thing, he says, was an experiment in something, where craft and simplicity (how do I make this thing simpler, how does it become through less doing?) were key issues. Finish Fetish West Coast Minimalism preferred a softer surface–like Bell’s coated glass–as opposed to the harder East Coast predilection for industrial materials like steel, concrete or plywood. But both were commenting on the relation to their technological environment. Californian artists, you could say added luster to their reductionism, added the sun, the surf and the gloss of custom-made cars. And where Bell’s ‘stable unit’ was once evidently a cube, it is now twisted, pink, yellow, bright red and reflective, undaunted by its own surface contortion.

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Sarah Crowner (b. 1974 in Philadelphia, lives and works in Brooklyn NY) is inter-disciplinary Modernism. Geometric constructs follow the spirit and legacy of past practices, cutting up, referencing, undoing, adding to, playing on and tribute to, a language of abstraction. Unfolding, remembering and befriending the past, through scissors, fabric, thread, ceramics, wood, an industrial sewing machine, and paint, Crowner re-stitches fragments into new concurrences. Paintings as paintings and paintings not afraid of being fashion, design, and part of our current technological, even voguish, environment restage art historical points of interest and anxiety, updating them into contemporary concerns.
For Larry Bell and Sarah Crowner, Meet Marlow Moss, Crowner visits Larry Bell and Marlow Moss, creating a complete setting for the exhibited pieces, including her own. New large-scale works are an analysis of earlier Bell and Moss, at once closely referencing these latest temporary teammates and at the same time tripping the light fantastic and stating full autonomy.

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Marjorie Jewel “Marlow” Moss (1889 – 1958), also known as Marlow Moss, was a biological realist, a recluse, a persona non grata, a phenomenon, an Amazon. She was a British, lesbian, Constructivist artist. She was also a woman, a Modernist, and a Neo Plasticist, a disciple of Piet Mondrian, and a student of Léger. She was a painter and a sculptor. She was a drag-king. She was a contemporary of Georges Vantongerloo, Jean Gorin, and Max Bill. Added to the list of adjectives could also be ‘middle class’, or even ‘upper-middle-class’, and Jewish, but then again she was also an atheist and an existentialist. Moss disrupts and subverts the narratives that could include her. This resistance to categorisation is a large factor in Moss’s obscurity; she is omitted from the histories, because she does not fit in. To date she is most consistently approached in reference to Mondrian, a context that casts her in the role of follower, or worse: imitator, a role that’s far beneath her.
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Kunstverein Publishing

Larry Bell, Sarah Crowner, Marlow Moss is a Kunstverein publication designed by Marc Hollenstein that will be launched during the Marlow Moss event, 18 May.
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Other dates and venues

18 April: Larry Bell artist-talk with Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam director Ann Goldstein in the Teijin Auditorium, Stedelijk Museum, 8–9.30 pm
18 May: Insert by Marlow Moss, an event at Kunstverein, 5–8 pm
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Larry Bell and Sarah Crowner, Meet Marlow Moss is made possible with the support of Stichting Niemeijer Fonds; Stadsdeel Zuid; Het Amsterdams Fonds voor de Kunst and Kunstverein’s (Gold) members. With thanks to De Vleeshal, Middelburg

From a letter to Barbara Rose about the primary concern of my work.

Once an artist friend of mine gave a party for some close friends, it was in celebration of his recent marriage. As the party went on, he took several people into the kitchen to try some very expensive Danish cheese, that he thought was fabulous.
I managed to slip unnoticed into the room to watch these gourmets enjoy themselves. Each one was given a small taste, and they all rolled their eyes back in their heads in sheer ecstasy as they savored the tiny morsel.
When I was discovered standing in the corner I was asked by one of the guest if I wanted a taste. My friend immediately replied, that to give me a taste was like ‘casting pearls before swine’. We all laughed and I had my taste. As it turned out I didn’t like the cheese, obviously proving his point.

Larry Bell

– Quoted from: ‘Larry Bell’, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, 8 December 1967 – 14 January 1968, Catalogue nr. 427

Larry Bell (born in 1939 in Chicago, Illinois) is an American artist. He lives and works in Taos, New Mexico, and maintains a studio in Venice, California. He is in Amsterdam for the exhibition ‘Larry Bell, Sarah Crowner meet Marlow Moss’, opening 20 April at Kunstverein. Bell is jointly invited by Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam and Kunstverein to hold an artist talk, and will be interviewed afterwards by Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam director Ann Goldstein in the Teijin Auditorium, Stedelijk Museum on Thursday 18 April at 8pm.

Reservation is required. Please send an e-mail to reservations@stedelijk.nl, stating your full name, e-mail address, telephone number, and the date of the event for which you want to reserve a seat.

This project is made possible with the support of Stichting Niemeijer Fonds; Stadsdeel Zuid; Het Amsterdams Fonds voor de Kunst and Kunstverein’s (Gold) members.

Hush Hush #4

IMAGINED MENU
Quanno tu mangiavi cor pensiero…*
*Quanno tu mangiavi cor pensiero… is a quotation from a poem written in Cellelager by a prisoner from Lazio. The regional dialect seems grammatically odd in Italian, and could be translated to English as ‘When we ate with our minds’ and/or ‘When we ate thoughts’.

The fourth in the Hush Hush series, organized especially for the members of Kunstverein Amsterdam, Milan and New York, is an Imaginary Lunch with real food ­– arranged, hosted and introduced by Italian artist Leone Contini (1976, Florence). The eight plus-course menu is made from a selection of regional recipes that were collected in a notebook by Italian war-prisoners in Germany during the First World War. As such, the meal is a reflection of a (historic) community and (a national) identity. Served now, 95 years later, it can also be seen to reflect our current status quo, one riddled with crises and transformed by global migration.

In late 1917, the worst military debacle in Italian history began: the infamous ‘Battle of Caporetto’. Between October 24 and November 19 countless soldiers were taken prisoner, and among them Giosuè Fiorentino, an 18 year-old Italian officer and the great uncle of Contini. From the Cellelager POW camp in northern Germany, these men who experienced displacement, despair and starvation, turned to imagined food to combat their misery. Food became an obsessive desire and an imaginary escape; it was the subject of endless discussions. Speaking about food was an attempt to turn a crowd of starving bodies into a community again, able to share memories from a previous life. In an attempt to humanize hunger, to reframe this primary instinct into a sort of – however virtual – conviviality, discussing meals also became a collective action of cultural resistance.

Giosuè Fiorentino recorded the oral recipes from his fellow prisoners – records of intimate fragments from family lives – and re-assembled them into two handmade sketchbooks, a patchwork of regional cuisine, from Friuli to Sicily. The cookbooks became an unintended ethnographic writing, picturing the cultural materiality of an ‘imagined community’ called Italy.

This action of resistance, conceived in the deep darkness of the First World War, will be turned into a real, collective action in the form of a Sunday lunch on the 7th of April.

Time: 1pm until 4.30pm
Location: We will gather at Kunstverein to walk to the restaurant.
Reservation: Seeing as space is limited, please make reservations before the 3rd of April at office@kunstverein.nl. The eleven course menu will cost EUR 25.10 per person, the exact price of production only. As this meal is being prepared especially for those invited, we kindly ask you to keep your reservations.

Kunstverein
Gerard Doustraat 132
1073 VX Amsterdam

Please note that this is a members-only event, if you don’t want to miss it, it’s time to become a member.

Imagined menu is developed in collaboration with Kunstverein Milan and generously supported by the City Council of Amsterdam, District South and AFK (Amsterdam Fund for the Arts) and Kunstverein’s (gold) members.

Tradition

A selection from the Center for Social Research on Old Textiles (CSROT) with works by Willem Oorebeek, Lucy Skaer and Christopher Williams.

Following Raven Row’s exhibition The Stuff That Matters, which presented for the first time the elaborate collection of historic textiles assembled by Seth Siegelaub over the past thirty years for the Center for Social Research on Old Textiles (CSROT), Marres, Centre for Contemporary Culture, will continue to explore Siegelaub’s collection in close dialogue with Maxine Kopsa and Krist Gruijthuijsen from Kunstverein in Amsterdam and the Grazer Kunstverein in Graz, Austria.

The exhibition will feature approximately 50 items from the collection, which currently comprises around 650 pieces. The selection is based on the abstraction of forms that make up functional textiles and on the abstracted potential of their function. It will include woven and printed textiles, embroideries and costume, ranging from fifth-century Coptic to Pre-Columbian Peruvian textiles, late medieval Asian and Islamic textiles, and Renaissance to eighteenth-century European silks and velvets. Barkcloth (tapa) and headdresses from the Pacific region (especially Papua New Guinea) and Africa will also be on display. To provoke multiple readings, the textiles in the exhibition will be shown alongside the works of three artists, Willem Oorebeek, Lucy Skaer and Christopher Williams, who’s individual practices examines the usage of appropriation, modernity, craftsmanship and representation.

An recent essay by artist Doug Ashford will accompany the exhibition.

Tradition is the result of a collaboration between Marres, Centre for Contemporary Culture, Maastricht, Kunstverein Amsterdam and Grazer Kunstverein, Graz, Austria.

The exhibition will travel to Grazer Kunstverein in June 2013

Opening: 15 March, 7-9 PM
Location: Marres,
 Centre for Contemporary Culture,
 Capucijnenstraat 98, Maastricht
Entrance: Valid ticket ]]> http://kunstverein.nl/2013/02/tradition/feed/ 0 http://kunstverein.nl/2012/12/musical-interlude/ http://kunstverein.nl/2012/12/musical-interlude/#comments Thu, 20 Dec 2012 07:58:27 +0000 krist http://kunstverein.nl/?p=2214 Musical Interlude

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Kunstverein is excited to invite you for a Musical Interlude on Friday January 25th at 8 pm. We will start the year with a performance by composer and musician Dorit Chrysler.

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‘A Wizard, A True Theremin Star! Imagine if Marianne Faithfull and Nikola Tesla had a love child, with Jane Birkin as the nanny and Bjork as the wayward Girl Scout leader!’

(Ann Magnuson of Paper Magazine)
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Dorit Chrysler is best known for her theremin style, the theremin is one of the earliest electronic music instruments and the first musical instrument played without being touched. The instrument is invented in 1919 by the Russian Leon Theremin.

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Dorit also has a prolific recording and performing career as a vocalist, guitarist, keyboardist, producer and engineer. She fronted a number of notable bands, including New York rock quartet Halcion and shared live bills with acts as diverse as Alex Hacke, Amon Tobin, Dinosaur Jr., Blond Redhead, Marylin Manson, Mercury Rev and Oingo Boingo.

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Besides that she also collaborated and recorded with artists & producers such as Tocotronic, Anders Trentemøller, Judah Bauer (Catpower). Matt Johnson (The Th-e), Neon Indian, Gordon Raphael (The Strokes) and many more.
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Embarking upon a solo career in 2000, Dorit has since performed worldwide, ranging from notorious dives. After a wide range of film &TV soundtracks, compilations, and singles, Dorit released her first solo record in 2004 featuring her theremin and which was produced, recorded, engineered, and performed by  (the artist) herself.
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Since 2005 she has toured the US, Japan, Australia, Canada, Brazil and played amongst others in Paris, London, Berlin, Stockholm, Mexico City, Reykjavik, Prague, Bucharest, Vienna, Switzerland, Italy, Spain, England, Portugal and New York. In addition to her solo career, she has founded the New York Theremin Society.

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This project is supported by the City Council of Amsterdam, District South and AFK (Amsterdam Fund for the Arts) and Kunstverein’s (gold) members .

In:quest of Icarus is a tragedy; a contemporary work written of and from a contemporary situation and drawing upon Greek myth to illuminate certain aspects of that situation.–Norman Potter

Norman Potter (1923–1995) was an English designer and educator. In 1964 Potter co-founded the Construction School, an experimental design course at the West of England College of Art in Bristol, England. His bold programme de-emphasised specialization in design and encouraged practical collaboration between disciplines. The school’s brief history is burdened by resistance to Potter’s ideas at every level of the educational institution. Coloured by this, and his involvement in the student protests of 1968, Potter’s thoughts on the structure of design education became increasingly anti-authoritarian.

In:quest of Icarus is a complex and allegorical reflection on these experiences. Potter describes the work as concerned with ‘walls, barriers, both of languages and hardware; the codes people use to protect their identity and to make random experiences ordered and comprehensible; the occasional wisdom of foolishness; freedoms and imprisonments; and so forth.’ It is Potter’s only play, and has been performed only once, by students at the Construction School on 5 December, 1974. The work is here represented by participants at the Werkplaats Typografie, Arnhem and the Sandberg Institute, Amsterdam.

The staging of the performance is integral. The design of the hall and props follows the visual language and apparatus of the typewriter, on which it was composed. The configuration of the hall itself is a representation of the typewriter, with the audience actively implicated in the position of the keys, described by Potter as ‘the alphabetic possibilities of the spoken and written language.’ The staging is prepared by the performers themselves, and the four day process of construction, rehearsal and performance together constitutes the work.

In:quest of Icarus (1975) is restaged by James Langdon in partnership with Kunstverein and the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam; performed by students of the Werkplaats Typografie with construction by Daniel Hofstede and Benjamin Roth.

Please note that In:quest of Icarus is a 3 day event and accessible to the public 30 November, 1 and 2 December at the Stedelijk Museum, Teijin Auditorium, during regular opening hours. The play will take place 2 December at 4pm in the Teijin Auditorium.

As seating is limited for the performance 2 December, please RSVP before Friday 23 November via office@kunstverein.nl. Please note that members have priority.

With thanks to Stadsdeel Zuid and The Sandberg Instituut.

• An extended slide-show presentation will be unveiled to the public on this occasion.
• Visually stimulating images will offer informative diagrams so as to describe the structures that have occupied the mind of the author and led to the creation of the work.
• The presentation will be accompanied by the performance Essence — in which a pop band will be present.
• This performance will honor the domain of popular culture in the modern-day formulation of a pop band and its ability to express the geometry of communicative patterns.

8 September – 2 December 2012

With In:quest of Icarus, a play by Norman Potter
30 November – 2 December 2012
Hosted and co-produced by the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam

This work explores the history of a bold attempt to establish an experimental art school in a provincial English context. The first phase (1964 to 1968) placed an emphasis on interdisciplinary working and collaboration. The second phase (1975 to 1977) was defined by a radical attempt to decentralise the educational structure of the school.

The school’s history is closely bound to the career and concerns of its founder Norman Potter, a practitioner in the margins of a mid-twentieth century English design culture. His work at the Construction School represents a period of intense critical thought about the structure of design education. The constitution of the school exemplified many of the ideas expressed in Potter’s What is a Designer, a text that was formulated during his time in Bristol. In particular Potter’s emphasis on the relational aspects of design – the mechanics of social interactions that shape design processes – was a defining feature of his programme.

The project was initiated during a residency at Spike Island, Bristol in Summer 2011. A presentation took place at Corner College in Zurich, June 2012. James Langdon is trained as an artist and now practices as an independent designer.

Workbench photograph courtesy Jim Wood.

Generously supported by the City Council of Amsterdam, District South

A Festival of Choices
Master of Fine Arts Graduation 2012,
Sandberg Instituut

Artist: Riet Wijnen

11–15 July 2012
Opening: 11 July, 6–9 PM

‘A Festival of Choices’ emphasizes upon the relationships and choices made between the graduating student and the diverse range of institutions and organizations offered within the cultural landscape of Amsterdam.

For more information and the full program, please check www.festivalofchoices.nl