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PROGRAMS LIST
ARTIST SERVICES
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Mark Beasley, Ellen Harvey, Carlo McCormick, Stephen O’Malley, Anne Pasternak, Cynthia Rowley, Tom Sachs, John Waters, Linda Yablonsky, and others
May 5, 2007-ongoing
Citywide
Image credit: Charlie Samuels
Aptly borrowing its title from a New York Dolls album, One Day It Will Please Us To Remember Even This was a project that marked the thirty-third anniversary of Creative Time and consisted of plaques commemorating historical New York art projects or moments, chosen by a range of artists and writers who have made a mark on New York themselves. Appropriately, thirty-three locations were chosen, granting those sites the legacy and prestige that only a public plaque can denote. Each site was also prescribed a telephone number that, when dialed, offered a personal audio guide to the location by the artist who chose it, enabling listeners to imagine what it was like to be part of history in the making.
Spartacus Chetwynd, Hamish Fulton, Gelitin, Jonathan Monk, Adrian Piper, Javier Tellez
May 1-June 2, 2007
Manhattan and Coney Island
Image Courtesy Creative Time
An international group of performers and young artists took over New York City’s streets, Coney Island’s beach, and even the foreheads of hundreds of New Yorkers throughout May 2007. The exhibition featured projects by Adrian Piper, who initiated an open call for volunteers to imprint the text “Everything will be taken away” on their foreheads in henna for two weeks, while the four-man group Gelitin simply dug a giant hole in the beach on Coney Island for seven days. Jonathan Monk restaged a new version of Daniel Buren’s 1975 performance Seven Ballets In Manhattan; Hamish Fulton created a “walk”—his first in New York City; Javier Tellez organized a street protest with hundreds of wind-up toy robots carrying placards written by children and mental health patients; and Spartacus Chetwynd, with a team of four others from England, developed improvisational interventions responding to the architecture throughout New York City and Coney Island. Utilizing a range of media and humor, with a nod to legendary earth works and endurance projects of the 1970s, Six Actions for New York City effectively created provocative pedestrian projects that enlivened the city with an art practice that remains inherently experimental and challenging.
Eve Sussman and The Rufus Corporation
February 22-27, 2007
323 6th Avenue and West 3rd Street
Image: Eve Sussman
Creative Time presented the United State’s premiere of Eve Sussman and The Rufus Corporation’s video-musical The Rape of the Sabine Women as a free public screening for one week during the 2007 Armory Show. Developed largely through impovisation and filmed with a cast of hundreds, The Rape Of The Sabine Women was conceived as an allegory based loosely on the ancient myth that follows Romulus’ founding of Rome and inspired by Jacques-Louis David’s 1799 painting, Intervention of the Sabine Women. Re-envisioning the myth as a 1960’s period piece with the Romans cast as G-men, the Sabines as butchers’ daughters, and the heyday of Rome allegorically implied in an affluent international style summer house, Sussman’s version is a riff on the original story of abduction and intervention in which Romulus devises a plan to ensure the future of the empire. While the Roman myth traces the birth of a society, Sussman’s telling suggests the destruction of a utopia: the intervention of the women is fraught, and the chaos that ensues transforms the designed perfection into nothingness.
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Ugo Rondinone
February 1, 2006-April 30, 2007
The Ritz-Carlton, 2 West Street
Image Credit: Charlie Samuels
Fabricated in aluminum and coated in white enamel, Ugo Rondinone’s sculptures for the sixth Art on the Plaza were cast from trees found in the countryside outside Naples, the hometown of his parents. In accordance with Italian law, the trees, which still bear olives, were cast on site in rubber; in the foundry, wax gave way to a final aluminum cast. By introducing metallic casts of this ancient tree to Lower Manhattan’s modern metropolis, typically defined by manmade structures of glass and concrete, Rondinone furthered his investigation of themes of time and displacement and the relationship between natural and artificial environments. The white trees, each weighing a ton, complemented New York City’s winter landscape and established a discourse between the history-laden olive trees and their unusual urban context. Known for a literary vision that often extends to the titles of his works, Rondinone named the cast trees with his own short poems: air gets into everything even nothing and get up girl a sun is running the world.
This project was created in partnership with Millennium Partners and the Battery Park City Authority.
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Doug Aitken; Klaus Biesenbach and Peter Eleey, curators
January 16-February 12, 2007
The Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53rd Street
Image: Doug Aitken
Mirroring the pulsating rhythms and energies of the city, Doug Aitken’s sleepwalkers was a multiscreen cinematic art experience that integrated film projections with the architectural fabric of its environs. Noting that “the city is about communication,” Aitken responded by transforming the concrete, glass, and brick of The Museum of Modern Art’s façade into a fluid mesh of interlacing narratives. While the films suggested an inner life of the buildings, they also reclaimed modern architecture for personal expression and imbued anonymity with fluid human presence.
The film itself depicted the nocturnal journeys of five characters representing city dwellers—a bicycle messenger, an electrician, a postal worker, a businessman, and an office worker. As they moved from the solitude of their personal and professional lives into the chaotic and rich interrelationships of their urban existences, the characters’ individual narratives were juxtaposed on different surfaces of the Museum’s exterior, with moments of parallel synchronicity in their movements emphasizing both the solitude of their lives as well as their membership in the same urban community.
In collaboration with MoMA, the project was the artist’s first large-scale public artwork in the United States and was the first to bring art to the newly renovated museum’s exterior walls.
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Haluk Akakçe
November 3-30, 2006
Viva Vision screen, Las Vegas
Image credit: David Lancaster
Following his first visit to Las Vegas, Turkish artist Haluk Akakçe formed an impression of the infamous city as a kind of electric painting emerging from the evening desert, a metaphor for his own work. Sky is the Limit became Akakçe’s interpretation of Las Vegas, modeled after his own experience there. Working on the Viva Vision canopy screen—the largest video screen in the world—Akakçe built an electronic sky, a virtual universe in which raindrops seem to land from above, sending ripples throughout the rendered skyscape. For Akakçe “the canopy represent[ed] the limit of perception.” Appropriately, Sky is the Limit also referenced the seemingly unlimited promise that gambling holds out to us, the power to change our destiny, for better or for worse, in the pull of a slot machine lever or the roll of the dice. The work’s narrative crescendoed toward an ecstatic moment evocative of the euphoria of winning, but in fact retained much of the deliberate pacing of Akakçe’s recent pieces. Offering a space out of time in a parallel world, Sky is the Limit fit perfectly in the mirage that is Las Vegas.
This project was produced in partnership with the Las Vegas Arts Commission and Fremont Street Experience.
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Mel Chin, Coco Fusco, Jens Haaning, Michael Rakowitz
September-October, 2006
150 1st Avenue; 529 Atlantic Avenue, Brooklyn; and various locations throughout New York City
Image courtesy Creative Time
In addition to the provocative Who Cares dinner conversations and as part of Creative Time’s endeavor to investigate the contemporary dearth of socially-engaged art, four artists were commissioned to create public art projects which were presented in the Fall of 2006, a year after the dinners and around the time of the Who Cares book release. Political, acerbic, and witty, the projects included Mel Chin’s animated film comparing the histories of 9/11 in the United States, 2001, with 9/11 in Santiago, Chile, 1973, Coco Fusco’s multimedia performance about women’s role in the “War on Terror” (September 28-October 1, 150 1st Avenue), Michael Rakowitz’s temporarily reopened family import-export business from Brooklyn to Iraq (October 1-31, Atlantic Ave., Brooklyn), and Jens Haaning’s Arabic Joke, a traditional joke depicted on posters in Arabic and displayed throughout the city (various locations, October.)
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Hjalti Karlsson, Jan Wilker
September 4-September 10, 2006
Times Square, Madison Square Park, Chelsea, SoHo, Battery Park City, Coney Island
Image credit: Justin Ouellette
In search of an idea for the cover of Creative Time’s first major book celebrating thirty-three years of bringing art throughout New York City, the team of designers, Hjalti Karlsson and Jan Wilker of karlssonwilker inc., conceived of a means to generate a cover that would capture the essence of the organization: a site-specific public art project called The Urban Visual Recording Machine (UVRM).
The UVRM was a set of equipment housed in a truck reminiscent of a “pope mobile” with its large Plexiglas windows. The machines in the truck were programmed to record the colors, volume of sound and voices, and weather (wind speed and direction, temperature, and humidity) of each individual location the truck traveled to for that moment in time. The data was instantly transcribed into an abstract visual representation of the environment, with graphic shapes and patterns created by the designers and Show & Tell Production, and printed out on-site with the time and date. Every thirty seconds for five days the truck visited locations of signature Creative Time projects: Times Square, Chelsea, the East Village, Coney Island, The Art Parade in Soho, and Lower Manhattan. Five thousand book covers, each capturing a moment in New York City, were instantaneously printed on-site, effectively bringing together new technology with artistic vision as part of Creative Time: The Book.
Michael Bevilacqua, B-Girlz presented by Martha Cooper, Dazzle Dancers, E. V. Day, Pia Dehne, Adam Dugas, David Ellis, Fischerspooner with Gareth Pugh, Micah Ganske, Os Gemeos, J.V.A. Flag Corporation, Taylor McKimmons, Ted Mineo, Muffin Head and Amber Ray, Julie Atlas Muz, Ara Peterson, Michael Portnoy, Steve Powers, Cristina Lei Rodriguez, Robert Snead, Bec Stupak, Three As Four, Momoyo Torimitsu, Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black, and others
September 9, 2006
West Broadway between Houston and Grand streets
Image credit: Justin Ouellette
Following the success of the inaugural Art Parade 2005, Creative Time, Deitch Projects, and Paper magazine teamed up again to bring New York City spectators The Art Parade 2006: a sometimes chaotic but always entertaining procession of floats, placards, portable sculptures, kites, performances, and street spectacles created by over seventy-five artists, performers, and designers.
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Euan Macdonald
July 19-September 30, 2006
Times Square
Image: Euan Macdonald
Part of Creative Time’s summer group exhibition Strange Powers, Euan Macdonald’s simple video raised questions about whether seeing is in fact believing. A woman emerges through an orange curtain and slowly proceeds to the middle of the stage. She stands alone, perfectly still, hands clasped. Her fixed glance is direct and intense, yet unthreatening. Depicted in real time from a fixed camera angle, with the most minimal of action, the video’s simplicity and focus compelled viewers to watch in anticipation for more to be revealed.
But as in much of Macdonald’s meditative work, almost nothing happened, at least nothing that appeared immediately visible. It is the title of the work—Healer—that leads one to consider the possibility that this seemingly mundane and elusive performance might be something more. Indeed, the video’s subject was a psychic healer whom Macdonald met in New Zealand, and who has practiced healing for most of her life. Whether or not they had time to consider whether they believed in such a practice, those who crossed Times Square under Macdonald’s video received some small gesture of her healing work.
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Pawel Althamer and Arturmijewski, James Lee Byars, Sophie Calle and Fabio Balducci, Center for Tactical Magic, Peter Coffin, Jennifer Cohen, Anne Collier, Christian Cummings, Trisha Donnelly, Douglas Gordon, Brion Gysin, Friedrich Jürgenson, Joachim Koester, Jim Lambie, Miranda Lichtenstein, Euan Macdonald, Jonathan Monk, Senga Nengudi, Paul Pfeiffer, Eva Rothschild, Mungo Thomson; Laura Hoptman and Peter Eleey, curators
July 19-September 17, 2006
64 East 4th Street
Image credit: Justin Ouellette
Strange Powers assembled pieces by more than twenty internationally acclaimed artists whose work explores the transformative power of art through a variety of magically charged manifestations. While a number of exhibitions have examined aspects of the occult and the spiritual, Strange Powers showcased artworks that were made to actually have a paranormal effect on the world, including spells, talismanic objects, and apparitions conjured and transcribed.
Extending the show to Times Square, Euan Macdonald’s video portrait of a healer simultaneously offered its subject’s positive psychic effects to the wider public on the last minute of every hour as The 59th Minute video on the Panasonic Astrovision.
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Julie Atlas Muz, Steve Powers, and others
June 24, 2006
Coney Island
Image: Creative Time
The Mermaid Parade was a colorful, spectacular event to celebrate the The Dreamland Artist Club projects on Coney Island. Julie Atlas Muz performed parade duties as Miss Coney Island, working with artist Steve Powers and others to create the Miss Coney Island float, which also appeared in The Art Parade 2006. Powers also created multi-user pink bicycles for participants to ride through the parade.
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Doug Aitken with Aa, Vito Acconci, Black Dice, Stan Brakhage, Adam Green, George Greenough, Jeff Koons, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Miranda July, Kelly Sears, Superstudio
May 6, 2006
Essex Street Market, 80 Essex Street
Image courtesy Creative Time
Doug Aitken’s book Broken Screen is comprised of informal conversations between himself and a roster of twenty-five carefully chosen filmmakers, designers, architects, and other artists. Part guidebook, part manifesto, Aitken’s book took a fresh look at what it’s like to create artwork in a world that has become increasingly fragmentary. Through casual and direct discussions Broken Screen offers a detailed navigation through the ideas behind the important yet under-documented visual language of nonlinear narratives, split screens, and fragmentary visual planes that define the most progressive moving images today. Perhaps best of all, Broken Screen is a unique opportunity for readers to learn the thoughts and personal beliefs of the featured artists in their own words and imagery, unencumbered by critical or commercial filters, and communicated in the manner of a conversation between friends. Through the vehicle of Broken Screen, Aitken sought to produce a cultural manifesto for new communication, expression, and understanding in both the present and future.
In partnership with Hermès, and in celebration and recognition of Aitken’s editorial work in bringing multivalenced artistic disciplines together, Creative Time presented Broken Screen Happening–a night of musical performances by Aa, Black Dice, and Adam Green; conversations between Aitken and Vito Acconci, Miranda July, and Jeff Koons; and film screenings by Alejandro Jodorowsky, Superstudio, Kelly Sears, George Greenough, Stan Brakhage, and Acconci.
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Marilyn Minter
March 1-March 31, 2006
Chelsea
Photo: Charlie Samuels
Throughout the month of March 2006 Marilyn Minter’s seductive and hyperrealistic photographs towered over four art galleries in Chelsea as spectacular billboards. Recreating the lush images she shot for fashion magazines, Minter substituted the gooey, visceral material of mud in place of water, transforming an ideal fashion object into a messy, flawed, and very human form. Legs became splattered with dirt while perfectly pedicured toes oozed with grime as if they had been walking through the city in a storm. For Minter, the billboards were an outgrowth of her interest in blurring the boundaries between fine art and commercial art and co-opting commercial genres and spaces for her artistic practice. Both attractive and repulsive simultaneously, Minter’s billboards ultimately seduced viewers, who, complicit in their own dirty secrets, succumbed to the guilty pleasure of looking at the tainted object of desire.
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Brian Alfred, Ara Peterson, Mark Titchner
March 7-June 5, 2006
Times Square
Image: Mark Titchner
Even before the term “hypnosis” was first used by Scottish physician James Braid in 1843, the medical profession had experimented with ways to ease patients into trance-like states for therapeutic purposes. From the turn of the last century, therapies involving subliminal messaging have gone in and out of favor, while the creators of advertising and their critics have debated the market-motivated use of these “subthreshold effects,” as pop sociologist Vance Packard termed them in 1950s. Presented on a revolving schedule in the middle of Times Square during the last minute of each hour, videos by Brian Alfred, Ara Peterson, and Mark Titchner evoke the fraught history of images as they are used for their effect on our minds for healing, political, and economic purposes.
All three of these emerging artists use video as part of practices that span a variety of media, including painting, sculpture, drawing, collage, print, and installation. Ara Peterson’s Energy Fields recalls the psychedelic light shows that accompanied live music events in the 1960s but in Times Square Peterson’s pulsing and rhythmic editing brings to mind the aggressive seduction of today’s savvy advertising, along with its hypnotic aspirations. In Voices you cannot hear Mark Titchner explores the faith we place in ideologies, often combining the visual traditions of propaganda and self-improvement regimens, while Brian Alfred, whose animated videos grew out of his work in painting and collage, references both the chaos and regimentation of our digitally-networked era: Help Me! mimics the insistent visual tone of the real-time news tickertape scrolling beneath the Astrovision screen.
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Aïda Ruilova
December 20, 2005–March 6, 2006
Times Square
Image: Aïda Ruilova
Aïda Ruilova’s psychologically charged and visually striking video Countdowns gave a dynamic twist to the tradition of countdowns, an infamous annual event, particularly in Times Square. Projected onto the giant Astrovision screen where the infamous New Years Eve ball has dropped since 1907, Ruilova’s work presented a jittery, rapid sequence of counting images or references, culled from sources such as the children’s television show Sesame Street, rockets blasting off into outer space, the countdown at the beginning of films, and of course, the international tradition of boisterously counting down the last ten seconds of the year. Caught within the format of video however, Ruilova’s frenetic images created an antitheis of countdowns—never climaxing, never ending, always waiting, and fated to repetition at the fifty-ninth minute of every hour.
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Dinner participants Doug Ashford, Julie Ault, Gregg Bordowitz, Tania Bruguera, Paul Chan, Mel Chin, Dean Daderko, Peter Eleey, Coco Fusco, Chitra Ganesh, Deborah Grant, Hans Haacke, K8 Hardy, Sharon Hayes, Emily Jacir, Ronak Kapadia, Byron Kim, Steve Kurtz, Julian LaVerdiere, Lucy Lippard, Marlene McCarty, John Menick, Helen Molesworth, Anne Pasternak, Heather Peterson, Paul Pfeiffer, Patricia C. Phillips, Michael Rakowitz, Ben Rodriguez-Cubeñas, Martha Rosler, Ralph Rugoff, Amy Sillman, Allison Smith, Kiki Smith, David Levi Strauss, Nato Thompson, The Yes Men
November-December, 2005
New York City
Image: Amorales
Interested in why the organization wasn’t seeing more art related to social action or receiving many proposals from artists to explore such issues, Creative Time invited thirty-seven artists, curators, and scholars to come together over three intimate dinners and discuss the viability of counter-cultural practice within the visual arts. The dinner conversations focused on the ways in which art functions as a public practice—from the globalization of creative economies and the dominance of restrictive notions of beauty to contemporary American war culture—and offered provocative and insightful analysis from a myriad of disparate perspectives. The conversations of Who Cares were recorded and reproduced as a book distributed by D.A.P. in October 2006.
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Adam Cvijanovic, Trisha Donnelly, Shannon Ebner, Leandro Erlich, William Forsythe, Sol LeWitt, O. Winston Link, Gordon Matta-Clark, Corey McCorkle, Helen Mirra, Saskia Olde Wolbers, Adam Putnam, Paul Ramírez Jonas, Song Dong; Peter Eleey, curator
October 14–November 20, 2005
820 Washington Street
Image credit: Charlie Samuels
The Plain of Heaven, an exhibition inspired by the impending redevelopment of the High Line, a disused elevated rail structure that runs up the west side of Manhattan, engaged many themes to examine the railway’s impending transformation: how we imagine, and long for, inaccessible spaces; the relationships between transfiguration, destruction, and rebirth; the opposition between nature and the urban environment; and more generally, the way in which we remystify the world we already know.
The twin legacies of Gordon Matta-Clark and Robert Smithson—artists who refigured the industrial and urban landscape of the 1970s—animated much of the show, expanding upon similar concerns about the natural environment found in 19th-century sublime landscape painting and 18th-century notions of the “picturesque.” The exhibition’s title, adapted from a painting by British artist John Martin, refers to the idea of an elevated, sublime environment that lies just beyond our reach, yet is firmly planted in our aspirations and imagination, an apt reflection on the overall premise of the show.
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Jenny Holzer
September 29–October 9, 2005
NYU Bobst Library, 70 Washington Square South; Rockefeller Center; New York Public Library, intersection of Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street
Photo: Attilio Maranzano © 2005 Jenny Holzer, courtesy Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY.Text: “Safe House II” by Dana Goodyear.
In For the City Jenny Holzer’s light projections of poetry and declassified documents once again illuminated landmark New York City buildings. At the Rockefeller Center and The New York Public Library poems by Wisława Szymborska, Yehuda Amichai, Henri Cole, Mahmoud Darwish, and other celebrated writers moved across the nighttime facades, encompassing the reader with language’s power to educate and console. At New York University’s Bobst Library, Holzer projected recently declassified government documents released under the Freedom of Information Act. Holzer’s presentation of these documents suggests the American society’s struggle to achieve an equitable balance between transparency and secrecy, public and private.
For nearly a decade, light projections have been a critical component of Jenny Holzer’s artistic practice. The moving projections, akin to credits scrolling at the end of a film, allow Holzer to work demonstratively with the ephemeral. The projections always involve the cityscape and surrounding architecture; spaces, people, and time are included in an affirming gesture. Linking Holzer’s early street-based practice to her long-standing engagement with mass media tactics and content common to the world of advertising and news, the projections enable her to access the public realm and the average passerby from an artistic perspective.
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Song Dong
September 26–November 30, 2005
Times Square
Image: Song Dong
In Broken Mirror, Chinese conceptual artist Song Dong destroys one reflective scene to reveal another, shattering the viewer’s conception of reality and juxtaposing China’s modern cityscape with its traditional landscape. Through a rapid succession of images, Song Dong exposes a rapidly modernizing China and explicates notions of transience and illusion in contemporary society. Watching Broken Mirror, the viewer is at first duped into thinking he is seeing nothing more than a foreign street scene and, like the passersby in the film, he too expects only to give the piece a momentary thought. Suddenly, a hammer wielded by the artist appears to smash through the busy street, in fact a mirror which was only reflecting the street scene. At the mirror’s destruction, the viewer is left with an image of a rural countryside. The opposing images are visually pitted against one another, demonstrating the proximity of the antiquated and the modern in our rapidly evolving cities and the vulnerability that lies beneath the facade. Song Dong’s act of destruction exposes the struggle of Beijing culture to maintain its traditions despite inevitable urbanization.
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