Posts Tagged ‘ICA’

El Corazon Sangrante/The Bleeding Heart

Friday, November 1st, 1991

FRIDA KAHLO’s Self-Por­trait with Thorn Neck­lace and Hum­ming­bird shows her in a jun­gle with but­ter­flies in her hair and a hum­ming­bird dan­gling from a thorn neck­lace that pierces her neck, draw­ing small red drops of blood. “I nev­er paint­ed dreams,” she said. “I paint­ed my own reality.”

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Rosemarie Trockel

Saturday, May 25th, 1991

“All these images are oblit­er­at­ed, defaced, lost. It’s about those mar­gin­al, mun­dane expe­ri­ences that are for some rea­son sig­nif­i­cant to her. There are cer­tain things about her work that are mys­te­ri­ous. They remain mys­te­ri­ous. And she trea­sures that mysteriousness.”

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Ilya Kabakov/Soviet Conceptual Art

Sunday, January 6th, 1991

When you look up, all those frag­ments con­vey a ver­tig­i­nous sense of dis­in­te­gra­tion, and decay. But when you look down, every­thing is com­pressed onto a sin­gle shiny sur­face, and it’s beau­ti­ful. All that debris — all that waste and pain — is trans­formed into art.

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Censorship and the Arts

Saturday, June 9th, 1990

It takes a lot of courage to be an artist. All kinds of things get in the way, but the thing that gets in the way the most is fear. That’s why the threat of cen­sor­ship is so dan­ger­ous to Art. Art helps us to see the beau­ti­ful — and also to face the ugli­ness in life. Artists need to be free to show us the world as they see it — to tell it like it is.

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Sophie Calle

Wednesday, January 24th, 1990

SOPHIE CALLE bor­rows ele­ments from detec­tive nov­els, philo­soph­i­cal inves­ti­ga­tions, the film noir, the nou­veau roman, doc­u­men­tary pho­tog­ra­phy, love let­ters, art movies, B‑movies, John Cage’s the­o­ries of ran­dom­ness, and Joseph Beuys’s actions. She com­bines them in star­tling ways, as med­i­ta­tions on the mys­te­ri­ous spaces between self and other.

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Yoko Ono

Sunday, January 7th, 1990

Every view­er who choos­es to par­tic­i­pate will have a dif­fer­ent expe­ri­ence. For me, it was a mov­ing med­i­ta­tion on loss, change, and get­ting a sec­ond chance. As one of the char­ac­ters in William Faulkn­er’s nov­el The Wild Palms says, “Between grief and noth­ing, I will take grief.”

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My Day Without Art

Monday, December 4th, 1989

Stand­ing at the cen­ter of the spi­ral, I see the backs of all the chairs fac­ing away from me, and feel a tremen­dous shock of lone­li­ness and loss. Look­ing down from the bal­cony, I see that the chairs are the begin­ning of a spi­ral that could go on forever.

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The Situationists

Saturday, January 28th, 1989

The Sit­u­a­tion­ists called for an art of excess, delir­i­um, out­rage, and social change. They believed that cap­i­tal­ism had turned con­tem­po­rary life into a soci­ety of “spec­ta­cle” that its inhab­i­tants could only pas­sive­ly watch and con­sume. Sit­u­a­tion­ism would bring art out of the muse­ums and into the streets, and sab­o­tage the soci­ety of spec­ta­cle by cre­at­ing sit­u­a­tions in which peo­ple could turn their own lives into a cre­ative experience.

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Frances Hamilton: Pieces of Time

Sunday, May 22nd, 1988

FRANCES HAMIL­TON’s art does­n’t come from the head; it comes from the hand and the heart. And that’s why a show of her work is always so reward­ing. Her images stay with you, grow­ing rich­er and deep­er, as time goes by. They trig­ger mem­o­ries. Major or minor, they touch a chord.

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