“Hello,

Recently collectors Shelley Fox Aarons and Philip E. Aarons asked me to stage my piece And Introducing Ryan McNamara at collectorspace. On January 17th, 18th, and 20th, I will be in the project space, equipped with photos, videos, and memorabilia dating from my birth to April 2010, waiting to familiarize others with my early years.

I’ll give you a tour, talk about things that matter (or have mattered) to me; hopefully, if all goes as planned, you’ll reciprocate. This meeting will be customized to fit your availability. You can call Collectorspace to schedule a time, but walk-ins are welcome.

See you soon,

Ryan”

***

Ryan McNamara is an artist based in New York. McNamara’s practice, with a focus on video and performance, intertwines the art community, social networks, and technology. He worked in temporary and collaborative projects in various biennial exhibitions, museum benefits, and one-night performances. Exhibitions and performances include Greater New York, MoMA PS1, the 2009 Athens Biennial, The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Kitchen, The Artist’s Institute, Performa 09 at X Initiative, and MoMA, New York.

Shelley Fox Aarons and Philip E. Aarons are collectors and devoted supporters of contemporary art.  They have loaned works from their collection to numerous exhibitions in Museums and alternative arts spaces worldwide, and have supported the publication of many exhibition catalogs and artists publications.  The Aarons are actively involved in many nonprofit art organizations in New York City, including MoMA PS1, the New Museum, Printed Matter, the High Line Art Program,  and Creative Time, among others. The Aarons also have a book collection that consists of over 10,000 publications with a focus on zines and independent books by artists from 1965 onward.

Image: Courtesy of the artist and Elizabeth Dee, New York.

Ella Kruglyanskaya’s Criminal Stickup in Yellow (2012) is the first figurative painting exhibited at collectorspace. This large, colorful, visually overpowering painting depicts a vicious quarrel between two fashionable, highly “feminine” figures, where the argument’s nature is at odds with the characters’ look. The somehow chauvinistic tone of one of the women is manifest in her menacing shadow that resembles a gangster holding a gun hip-high. The other woman, underneath the startled, innocent expression on her face, is charged with a vile attitude. The work unmercifully caricaturizes the two-facedness, cruelty, and backbiting that inflict women of supposedly sophisticated upper-echelons of our society.

The Way Things Go (Der Lauf der Dinge) is an art film by the artist duo Peter Fischli and David Weiss that premiered in 1987 at Documenta 8. The work depicts a nearly half-hour long series of sustained chain reactions involving non-glamorous every-day objects such as kettles, chairs, mattresses, balloons, tires, ladders, and trash bags. These ordinary objects perform a kinetic display of cause and effect as they crash, burn, melt, explode, ignite, dissolve, rotate, slide, and bang, exhausting the energy released from the breakdown of one another. The film documents a constant battle between predetermined precision and probabilistic implausibility; and the artists ensure a seemingly miraculous continuity in scene after scene where disorder and failure would have been the more likely outcome. Carefully choreographed by Fischli/Weiss, the objects in this 100 feet-long installation on stage in a large warehouse seem to have been given performing roles by the artists, and meticulously trained for their act. As Jeremy Millar describes in his book on this particular work, the film embodies many of the qualities of Fischli/Weiss’s oeuvre: “slapstick humor and profound insight, a forensic attention to detail, a sense of illusion and transformation, and a dynamic exchange between states of order and chaos.”

collectorspace is very pleased to present the Kramlich Collection with this iconic example of video art that happened to be one of the first pieces that entered the collection. Based in San Francisco, Pamela and Richard Kramlich have been collecting video, film, and time-based art for over two decades. In 1997, they established The New Art Trust along with Tate Modern, The Museum of Modern Art, and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art to support research and preservation of time-based media art.

* * *

Peter Fischli (b. 1952) and David Weiss (1946–2012) worked as an artist duo between 1987–2012. Fischli/Weiss won the Golden Lion Prize at the 2003 Venice Biennale. A retrospective of their work was exhibited at Tate Modern, London in 2006, and traveled to Kunsthaus Zurich and the Deichtorhallen Hamburg.

* * *

With special thanks to VIP Art Fair for allowing the screening of the collection visit video as part of the presentation of the Kramlich Collection at collectorspace. 

Video produced by Philip Dolin & Molly Bernstein of Particle Productions, New York.

collectorspace is pleased to host the launch of The Exhibitionist’s fifth issue on Saturday, March 10, 2012, from 6:30-8 pm at Cezayir Buyuk Salon in Istanbul. The launch event presents a discussion between Lynne Cooke, chief curator and deputy director of the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid, and Frances Morris, head of collections at Tate Modern (International Art) in London. Jens Hoffmann, editor of The Exhibitionist, will moderate the conversation.

In the last twenty years, discussions around the curatorial practice have focused on temporary exhibitions and biennials. In this context, how do art institutions create innovative models to present their collection, and what role does the museum hold in the 21st century? Taking cue from these questions, the speakers will explore the changing parameters for collection-building and collection displays at museums—a timely subject for art communities around the world, in which emerging private and corporate collections are increasingly opening to the public and evolving into institutional collections.

* * *

The Exhibitionist is a journal made by curators, for curators, focusing solely on the practice of exhibition making. The objective is to create a wider platform for the discussion of curatorial concerns, encourage a diversification of curatorial models, and actively contribute to the formation of a theory of curating.

 

 

HERB & DOROTHY Trailer from Herb & Dorothy on Vimeo.

Directed and produced by Megumi Sasaki, Herb and Dorothy (2008) tells the extraordinary story of Herbert Vogel, a postal clerk, and Dorothy Vogel, a librarian, who managed to build one of the most important contemporary art collections in history with very modest means. In the early 1960s, when very little attention was paid to minimalist and conceptual art, Herb and Dorothy quietly began purchasing the works of unknown artists. Devoting all of Herb’s salary to purchase art they liked, and living on Dorothy’s paycheck alone, they continued collecting artworks guided by two rules: the piece had to be affordable, and it had to be small enough to fit in their one-bedroom Manhattan apartment. Within these limitations, they proved themselves curatorial visionaries; most of those they supported and befriended went on to become world-renowned artists including Sol LeWitt, Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Richard Tuttle, Chuck Close, Robert Mangold, Sylvia Plimack Mangold, Lynda Benglis, Pat Steir, Robert Barry, Lucio Pozzi, and Lawrence Weiner.1

After years of collecting, the Vogels accumulated a collection that filled every corner of their rent-controlled apartment. In 1992, they decided to move their entire collection to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, and gifted the vast majority of it to the institution. However, they continued collecting. Many of the works they acquired appreciated so significantly over the years that their collection of more than 4,500 artworks is now worth millions of dollars. Still, the Vogels never sold a single piece. In late 2008, they launched The Dorothy and Herbert Vogel Collection: Fifty Works for Fifty Statesalong with the National Gallery of Art, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Institute of Museum and Library Services. The program donated 2,500 works to 50 institutions across 50 US states, and was accompanied by a book of the same name.

The core message of Herb & Dorothy is “you don’t have to be a Rockefeller to collect art.” Collectorspace presents this 89 minute-long film with Turkish subtitles at a well-attended artfair in Istanbul.

***

Herb and Dorothy received the Golden Starfish Award for the Best Documentary Film and Audience Award from the 2008 Hamptons International Film Festival. It has also received Audience Awards from the 2008 SILVERDOCS Film Festival and the 2009 Philadelphia Cinefest. Palm Springs International Film Festival named Herb & Dorothy one of their “Best of Fest” films in 2009.

¹ www.herbanddorothy.com