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--- On Tue, 6/15/10, e-Flux <i...@mailer.e-flux.com> wrote:
From: e-Flux <i...@mailer.e-flux.com>
Subject: San Francisco Art Institute presents On Kawara and Dan Perjovschi
To: hieror...@yahoo.com
Date: Tuesday, June 15, 2010, 3:10 PM
June 15, 2010
San Francisco Art Institute
From left: Dan Perjovschi working in the Walter and
McBean Galleries, San Francisco
On Kawara
Pure Consciousness, Abidjan, Ivory Coast
Courtesy of the artist
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Concurrent Exhibitions in the
Walter and McBean Galleries:
On Kawara: Pure Consciousness at 19 Kindergartens
Dan Perjovschi: The Institute Drawing
17 June – 18 September 2010
Opening reception: Wednesday, 16 June 2010 from 5:30 to 7:30pm
Walter and McBean Galleries
800 Chestnut Street
San Francisco, CA 94133
Tuesdays–Saturdays, 11:00am–6:00pm
Free and open to the public
www.sfai.edu/current
www.waltermcbean.com
On Kawara: Pure Consciousness
at 19 Kindergartens
Beginning in 1998, New York City-based Japanese artist On Kawara subtly
minimalized his longstanding already-minimalist
Today series, the date-painting project he began in 1966. Still ritualistically
maintaining the self-imposed constraints
of the project (principally, that the date on which the painting was begun be
its alphanumeric subject and that it be
completed before the end of that day and, if not, destroyed), Kawara opted to
modulate the reception of a week's
worth of these works (January 1 to January 7, 1997) by stationing them, under
the title Pure Consciousness, in nineteen
kindergartens across the globe.
Inasmuch as it presents an account of such modulated acts of reception, the
archival project On Kawara: Pure
Consciousness at 19 Kindergartens constitutes a kind of genealogical reprise, a
third act in the drama of withdrawal
that the kindergarten exhibitions themselves represent vis-à-vis the Today
series as it existed—and, a fortiori, was
exhibited—before 1998.
If the Today series (as exhibited prior to 1998) was marked by Kawara's (and,
thus, the beholder's) compulsive
concentration on the time of his life, then the act of withdrawal—the
minimalizing of already-minimalist
paintings—that Kawara's Pure Consciousness intervention entailed was, in
effect, a progressive undermining of the
by-now-banal artworld face-off, here and now, between work and beholder.
Indeed, the title Pure Consciousness itself
bespoke a situation in which it was child-developmentally—if not exactly
metaphysically—impossible for the work on
display to be, properly aesthetically speaking, beheld. The "gardens of
children" that made up the nineteen
spaces in which the same seven paintings again and again came to loom were
gardens whose instances of growth, whose
creaturely inhabitants, were beings rather more like the ones being beheld, as
it were by the thus newly animated
paintings, the dates on whose surfaces, in each case, occurred within the
as-yet-brief—the untimely—careers of the
children themselves, seven days in the lives of each of them.
The purity of the consciousness in question thus could be seen as the
children's perfectly beautiful indifference to
the spectacle of exhibitionism before which, be they never so fully alive and
absorbed in the round of their activities,
they could not even begin to know how to react, how to become present. It is
this radical failure in the know-how of
response, this "blindness" before the panopticality of artworks raised on high,
this easeful neutrality, that the
archival project On Kawara: Pure Consciousness at 19 Kindergartens aims to
invite its own "beholders" to consider and,
perhaps, to emulate—no doubt with the same unwitting theatricality and slight
desperation that the sophisticated adult
always betrays when attempting to rediscover within herself what Friedrich
Nietzsche called, in Beyond Good and
Evil, the seriousness that one had as a child at play (den Ernst . . . , den
man als Kind hatte, beim
Spiel).
Dan Perjovschi: The Institute Drawing
On the face of it, it would be hard to find an artist whose practice is simpler
than that of Romania-born and -based
Dan Perjovschi. His medium is site-specific drawing, albeit often ramified as
installation and performance. His
"canvas," like that of the graffiti artist (from whose "baroque" and
territory-marking methods he nevertheless firmly
distinguishes his own), is the nearest wall, preferably topographically
marginalized or, in his own word, "leftover."
And his utensils are nothing more than those easily accessible in a
grade-school classroom: chalk, marker, pencil, or
pen.
But if prima facie simplicity is a virtue, it's a virtue, in the case of
Perjovschi, made of a fairly dire necessity.
Though deposed and executed Romanian autocrat Nicolae Ceauşescu's notorious
austerity programs might be retroactively
interpreted as one of the principal catalysts behind the Romanian revolution of
1989, living that program before
the fact—whether as artist, as Perjovschi did, or as ordinary citizen—could
hardly be described as prospective of
impending emancipation. With shortages and rationing of most vital essentials
throughout Romania during the 80s, not
only were artist's supplies obviously—and comparatively unimportantly—difficult
to come by, but so was the very
lifeworld, the shared communal background, within (or against) which the artist
devises his concepts and objects. In
fact, Perjovschi has freely acknowledged that, contrary to Romantic notions
about the artistic inspiration to be won
through hardship and deprivation, inescapable-seeming misery is not
artistically enabling or "sexy" at all.
Nevertheless, the artistic voice he developed as his native land began to turn
away from Ceauşescu-style communism
toward its 2007 inclusion in the EU is a voice that retains the traces of its
passage—the madness of political
austerity and censorship having been transmuted into a method of simplicity and
candor, at once humorous and pungently
critical.
Above all, it's Perjovschi's candor, his commitment to what he calls "leav[ing]
the idea intact," that has carried over
to his current practice: drawing (and writing) against the grain of
one-dimensional transnational media
conglomerates whose Big Brother–like "right" to stay—and to keep their target
audience—on message seems all but
indefeasible. All but. And it's within the interstices and ambiguities of what
otherwise would amount to a
discursive hegemony that Perjovschi plies his trade—reappropriating,
dismantling, inserting, x-ing out, ironizing,
subverting. Definitely striving to turn things on their heads, he nevertheless
eschews the all-knowing, all-negating
perspective born of distance and critical superiority. With a lightness of
gesture, his aim is to activate and to
celebrate the space he has been given to work on and with, as well as to avoid
the surface cheer but deep cynicism of
the cultural, social, political, and economic prerogatives he counters.
Though airy and ephemeral, the marks Perjovschi makes are not intended as yet
another chapter in the postmodern
panegyric on impermanence-as-metaphysical-absolute. Rather, the fleetingness he
embraces in his drawing—a medium he
renders transdisciplinary and multidimensional—is an empathetic opening of the
self both to others and to the
otherness of real opportunities to revise, renew, and repeat. Such openness to
nonassertiveness, relinquishment, and
self-transformation complements Perjovschi's unpessimistic belief, this late in
the day, in the possibility of art's
genuinely mattering—a belief, wrought by hard experience rather than naiveté,
in something not altogether unlike the
artist as unacknowledged legislator of the world.
SFAI's Exhibitions and Public Programs are supported in part by the Grants for
the Arts/San Francisco Hotel Tax
Fund. Additional funding for Dan Perjovschi: The Institute Drawing has been
provided by the Romanian Cultural Institute
in New York City. On Kawara: Pure Consciousness at 19 Kindergartens and Dan
Perjovschi: The Institute Drawing are
presented as part of Global Figures, a component of SFAI's Exhibitions and
Public Programs. Devised by SFAI's Director
of Exhibitions and Public Programs Hou Hanru, Global Figures presents
one-person projects of major artists from
different cultures who have importantly influenced the current global art
scene. Dan Perjovschi will be in residence at
SFAI for a two-week period preceding the opening of his exhibition, during
which time he will create the drawings that
will comprise it.
San Francisco Art Institute
Founded in 1871, SFAI is one of the oldest and most prestigious schools of
higher education in contemporary art in the
US. Focusing on the interdependence of thinking, making, and learning, SFAI's
academic and public programs are dedicated
to excellence and diversity.
SFAI's School of Studio Practice concentrates on developing the artist's vision
through studio experiments and is based
on the belief that artists are an essential part of society. It offers a BFA,
an MFA, and a Post-Baccalaureate
certificate in Design and Technology, Film, New Genres, Painting, Photography,
Printmaking, and Sculpture/Ceramics.
SFAI's School of Interdisciplinary Studies is motivated by the premise that
critical thinking and writing, informed by
an in-depth understanding of theory and practice, are essential for engaging
contemporary global society. It offers
degree programs in Exhibition and Museum Studies (MA only), History and Theory
of Contemporary Art (BA and MA), and
Urban Studies (BA and MA).
SFAI's Dual Degree MA/MFA program is ideally designed for students who seek a
deep and balanced immersion in both
theoretical discourse and art practice. A three-year commitment, the degree
consists in an MA in History and Theory of
Contemporary Art and an MFA in any area of study within the School of Studio
Practice (see above).
For more information about this exhibition or other public programs at SFAI,
please go to www.sfai.edu or call 415 749 4563.
For information (including important dates) about undergraduate,
post-baccalaureate, and graduate admissions at SFAI,
please call 800 345 SFAI / 415 749 4500, e-mail admissi...@sfai.edu, or go to
www.sfai.edu/admissions.
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