"Action is guilt / Method to Rourke" in Beyond the “liminal experience” curated by Francesco Scasciamacchia
Beyond the “liminal experience”, curated by Francesco Scasciamacchia
The invited artists are: Izabela Chamczyk (Czestochowa, Poland 1980), Gabriele De Santis (Rome, Italy 1983), Daniela Di Donato (Lanciano (CH), Italy 1981), Alex Mirutziu (Sibiu, Romania 1981)
16th April - 18th June 2011
Opening 18.30 on 16th April 2011
The title of the exhibition comes from the concept of “liminality” through which Victor Turner during the 60s and the 70s called the state in which the spectator is when he/she attends a painful mise-en-scene. This condition is between the respect of the “art rules” and the “life laws”. On one hand the spectator would stop the artist while he/she is inflicting pain on himself/herself (ethical postulate); on the other hand he/she has to respect the artistic act in the name of Art (artistic postulate). The spectator remains in this suspended state for all the duration of performance.
Beyond the “liminal experience” invites the artists to reflect, to re-invent or simply to deal with the notion of “liminality” in an era of overuse of images in which videos and pictures have became the new media for the “violent act”. Beyond the “liminality” but also beyond the media of performance and of ephemeral actions.This psychological mechanism inducts the public to think about contemporary art, affirming its existence. Regardless of whether the spectator will like or dislike the artworks, they will realize that contemporary art exists as a fact.
On the occasion of the opening, Alex Mirutziu will perform “Action is guilt / method to Rourke”. (Via Genova 17/15 Prato 59100 - Spazio Vault)
Alex Mirutziu in Flash Art No. 277, March/April 2011 // REVIEW by Anne Martens
Flash Art International is out with two covers: a special project by James Franco and Francesco Vezzoli, and Natalie Portman wearing Rodarte's Black Swan costume.
Highlights from the news section: interviews with Rasha Salti and Haig Aivazian—respectively curator (with Susan Cotter) and associate curator of Sharjah Biennial 10—and with the curatorial team of "Open House," 3rd edition of the Singapore Biennale; curator Lauren Ross and Alexander Ferrando on the opening of the second segment of Manhattan's 'open-air museum,' The High Line; Nicola Trezzi and Amy Mackie on her recent appointment, and plans, as Director for Visual Art at the New Orleans Contemporary Arts Center; Director Mark Sladen interviewed by Maria Kjær Themsen on the re-opening of the Copenhagen's Kunsthal Charlottenborg and its spring program; Michele Robecchi on the competition for the acquisition of the 880-square-meter munition depo, finally won by The Serpentine Gallery; Antonella Massari talking to Giancarlo Politi about Unicredit Group's involvement with contemporary art; Paul Chan discussing his endeavors in the publishing realm; Carsten Höller in an interview by Alessandra Olivari that locates his recent project JapanCongo within the artist's latest artistic production; the first of Donatien Grau's series of interviews with gallerists, this time devoted to Yvon Lambert.
Features:
"Art and show business are organized around differing cores of transparency and opacity." (David Robbins).
David Robbins' "High Entertainment" introduces this issue's leitmotiv, analysing how differently the media culture's star model performs within the two contexts.
In "Going to the Oscars" Francesco Vezzoli meets and talks to James Franco in a conversation that brings to the fore their common interest in a "contemporary practice that seems to once again embrace fictionalized realities and to realize complex fictions," as Klaus Biesenbach, in his brief introduction, emphases.
Donatien Grau discusses Lady Gaga's definition of her own practice as one of "pop performance art" via connections to—and cross-references with—personalities such as Terence Koh and Francesco Vezzoli, Marina Abramovic and Andy Warhol.
Maurizio Cattelan meets Laura and Kate Mulleavy of Rodarte in an interview that recounts Californian atmospheres, stirs family memories and pays homage to the designers artistic collaborations and inspirations.
Also featured:
"The Responsive Eye," where Carsten Nicolai revisits the 1965 Museum of Modern Art exhibition that appeared to have set the "perfect conditions to explore and share a type of art that engaged audiences in optical reactivity," and became known as the "height of the Op Art wave."
Karlyn De Jongh, initiator of "Personal Structures: Time-Space-Existence," contributing a feature on Keith Sonnier that is structured around the two key components of his work since his start in the late '60s: light and space.
The vocabulary of classical modernism (Constructivism, Suprematism, Minimalism) that permeates the art of Katja Strunz, as the subject of an interview with the artist by Gesine Borcherdt.
Alejandra Aguado in an interview with Argentinian artist Jorge Macchi about the relationships of his practice to literature and journalism as well as on the abundant presence of references to religion and Christianity.
Teheran-born, The Hague-based artist Navid Nuur, who speaks to Christine Macel about the layered and modular nature of his work that, often at a very late moment in time, assembles ideas and "archived" material that find its precise and final meaning in a found context's specificity.
This issue's "Spotlights" are: "Move: Choreographing You" by Eliza Williams; "Katarzyna Kozyra: Casting" by Kamila Wielebska; and "Francis Alÿs: A Story of Deception" by Pierre-Yves Desaive.
This issue's "Brand New" artists are: Petrit Halilaj, interviewed by Laura Cherubini; Aki Sasamoto, interviewed by Mary Rinebold; Paloma Polo, interviewed by Emma Brasó; and Dor Guez, interviewed by Galit Mana.
This issue's reviews include: Stephen G. Rhodes, Jesse McCloskey, Mona Vatamanu and Florin Tudor, Nigel Cooke, Alex Mirutziu, Never The Same River, Mat Collishaw, Martin Creed, You and Now, Ėtienne Chambaud, Stephen Shore, Josephine Pryde, Those Ghosts, The Nose of Michelangelo, Pablo Pijnappel, Sigurdur Gudmundsson, Sara Ramo, Vangelis Gokas, Tobias Zielony, Mimmo Jodice, Claire Fontaine, Ravi Agarwal.
Francesco Scasciamacchia and Alex Mirutziu delivers textualities on "Re-enactment and Interpretation: problems of Authorship and of Negotiation with Museums" // this wednesday in London
On March 30, 2011, Francesco Scasciamacchia, contemporary art curator, will deliver a speach on "Reenactment, reinterpretation or representation? The problem of event oriented art within the contemporary museum", with contribution from Alex Mirutziu.
Francesco Scasciamacchia (Italy, 1982) obtained his Master of Science in Arts Management at Bocconi University in Milan. He worked during these years for public and private art institutions such as, DOCVA-Viafarini, Milan; MART-Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Rovereto, Italy, and Arnaldo Pomodoro Foundation, Milan. Recently he worked as news editor for the contemporary art magazine, Flash Art for which he is continuing to contribute as a London correspondent.
On this occasion Alex will talk about "Critique on how temples move faster than their shadows", presented in Los Angeles last December, at Mihai Nicodim Gallery. He wil also introduce his upcoming performance piece called ACTION IS GUILT - method to Rourke, intricate piece that touches on the notion of action in relation to performance, working with articulations and half articulations of what we understand as action as a form of knowledge.
Modernism.ro // Romanian presence during the Armory Week, NYC
Image: Alex Mirutziu/ Runway spill #2, 2011, HD video
LA-based Mihai Nicodim Gallery will present at this year’s Armory Show a series of Romanian visual artists. Also, following the 2010 participation to Independent art fair supported by RCINY, Sabot Gallery from Cluj-Napoca feat. Alex Mirutziu continues its presence in NYC during the Armory Week at the contemporary video works art fair Moving Image.
Alex Mirutziu (b. 1981) is a Romanian artist whose work cuts across multiple domains, including conceptual writing, performance, photography and video installations. His work endows social processes with ephemeral emergence as the main constructs in an attempt to reconfigure the relation between information and form, psychophysical language and content, challenging origins and meaning. After the disturbing soloist performance, “Atrocity Exhibition,” in 2004, he continued his research at the University of Fine Arts in Cuenca, Spain, where his performative approach resulted in the suppression of one of his projects, which provoked strong reactions among artists and scholars in both Spain and Romania. Starting in 2004, the investigation of the real began when a new anatomical specimen emerged, Lick&Destroy, a corrupt and ambiguous approach to identity, with which Mirutziu produced himself distinctively in discontinuous, contradictory virtualities. In 2007, the English director, John Britton, formed an experimental master class with eight heterogeneous performers, one of which was Alex Mirutziu. Shortly after the physically intensive training, he toured England with his social-comment performance, Leave Gordon Brown Alone, produced in Liverpool, Leeds and Berlin. He received international recognition in Madrid and Paris at Optica Video Art Festival, and was awarded Best Independent Artist. He frequently worked with Grit Hachmeister, VIP group, Arandjel Bojanovic, Liviana Dan and Noa Treister. Following his “Manifest of Flaw” show at Sabot in October 2009, Alex Mirutziu presented solo projects at Rüdiger Schöttle in Munich, and at Mihai Nicodim in Los Angeles. Recent group exhibitions include: Object-Orientation: Bodies and/as Things, in 2011, at Cerritos College Art Gallery, Norwalk, CA (USA), and Ars Homo Erotica, in 2010, at the National Museum in Warsaw (Poland).
The entity of fashion as a gerund status: fashion – a thing happening now, where the focus is on the emergent, potential ability to signal and set in motion moments during the performance. What is striking in the “Runway spills” videos is the diffusion of focus away from the garment and onto a situation that disrupts a specific convention (falling on the catwalk); the now of runway live performance that sometimes corrupts, and contradicts itself, in its redeployment of functions from the existence of an abstract idea to the tangible production.