Momenta Art Annual Catalog 2010-11 by Momenta Art

2010 2011

introduction

Alternative Resistance by Maureen Connor

Intangible Interferences

Nina Lola Bachhuber

Winter Break

Video 2011

Maureen Connor and the Institute for Wishful Thinking

J. PASILA / PETER SCOTT

Acknowledgements

ISBN # 9780-9678868-8-651500 Momenta Art 359 Bedford Avenue Brooklyn, NY, 11211 tel 718.218.8058 www.momentaart.org This is a publication of Momenta Art. This catalog was made possible with a grant from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Copyright remains with individual contributors. Design by Sarah Vogwill Photography by Frank Schwere/ Alan Wiener Cover image: Peter Scott, After Christmas, 2010 Facing Page: Peter Scott, Actual Size, 2011 All rights reserved. 2

Momenta Art is an artist-run charitable institution that works to promote emerging and underrepresented artists. The organization seeks to expand the dialogue of art by showing work that is not well represented in commercial galleries because of its form or content. Momenta Art promotes artists of all ages, races, and ethnicities, and particularly work that explores the nature of aesthetic experience balanced with social engagement. The publication of this catalog was made possible through the generous support of the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Supporters: The Greenwall Foundation, The Greenwich Collection, Ltd., The Jerome Foundation, Assemblyman Joseph Lentol, Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz, New York State Council on the Arts, The New York State Off ice of Parks, NYC Department of Cultural Affairs, Recreation and Historic Preservation, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, and White Columns, Ray Mortenson and Jean Wardle, Milton and Ruth Parnes, Robert Thill, and Nick Winter. Founding Members: Donna Czapiga, James Mills. Board of Directors: Laura Parnes, Ann Fensterstock, Christopher Gaillard, Rico Gatson, Eric Heist, Elisabeth Kley, Valerie McKenzie, Jude Tallichet Advisory Committee: Michael Ashkin, Huma Bhabha, Jody Culkin, Julie Durkin, James Elaine, Amy Ben-Ezra, Omer Fast, Kathleen Goncharoff, Jon Kessler, Kristin Lucas, Bob Marty, Wangechi Mutu, O. Donald Odita, Janet Phelps, Rebecca Quaytman, Calvin Reid, Ellen Salpeter

introduction This catalog is a record of Momenta Art’s final season at 359 Bedford Avenue in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. It marks the end of Momenta’s long tenure in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. When we moved into our first permanent location in New York at 72 Berry Street in 1995, Williamsburg was a place where, for a time, much was made possible. Artists were free to present work in a location removed from the commercial pressures of mainstream Manhattan. The exhibitions documented in this catalog serve to encapsulate some of the collective, inclusive, and risk-taking gestures that Williamsburg allowed us to accommodate. We are happy to have been a part of this history of the evolution of the neighborhood. However, we acknowledge that art organizations and artists play into the real estate models that force us out of the very neighborhoods we helped to develop, along with many of the artists who called those neighborhoods “home.” Despite loud voices of opposition to unbalanced development raised by artists and lowincome individuals and families, luxury development went through with no provisions for either. During our three years on the south side of Williamsburg, We realized that the artist population we once served had been forced out — to Bushwick, Bed-Stuy, and Sunset Park. We are left wondering if there is an alternative to this model? Can we organize, find our political power, and have some measure of control? Will the new Brooklyn Loft Law have an impact? Can we work with low-income residents to put more pressure on city officials to provide additional protection? And if we spend all our time being politically and economically aware will we still be able to make art? Are we destined to nomadic lives of making the world safe for the wealthy? As we settle into Bushwick, our new home, we must continue to grapple with these questions. Although we have an impressive, wonderful new space, we will remain critical and engaged. We promise not to become predictable or safe, to keep making ourselves as uncomfortable as we hope to make you, and to keep questioning our role and the role of art, wherever that leads. 3

Alternative Resistance by Maureen Connor Although Momenta began in Philadelphia in 1986 and finally found its first permanent New York home in Williamsburg, Brooklyn in 1995, its existence and development seems in many ways a direct response to the New York based alternative space movement, which began in the early 1970s. And while the first iterations of alternative art spaces have been well documented,1 not as much has been written about more recent initiatives like Momenta, which evolved in response to a very different social and aesthetic landscape. While virtually all alternative spaces were established in response to the limitations and exclusiveness of mainstream institutions, many were also founded with activist intentions. Among those, almost all can be traced back to the Art Workers Coalition.2 First organized in 1969 to challenge MoMA’s treatment of artists, the AWC held a public forum the same year that generated a list of thirteen demands that included: — A section of the museum should be under the direction of black artists and devoted to their accomplishments — The museum’s activities should be extended to Black, Spanish and other groups and they should also present exhibits with which these communities could identify — A section of the museum should be devoted to showing works of artists without galleries — Admission should be free.3 Rather than waiting for MOMA to agree to their demands, groups of artists from AWC decided to create their own institutions, and before long El Museo del Barrio, 1969; the Bronx Museum of the Arts, 1971, Basement Workshop, 1971 and the Ad Hoc Women Artists’ Committee, 1970 out of which grew AIR Gallery, 1972 and Soho 20, 1973, were developing their own forms of artists’ organizations.4 In various ways these spaces appropriated the strategies of autonomy and self-determination that originated in the progressive and egalitarian political movements of the time—the Civil Rights Movement, the AntiWar movement, the Feminist and Gay Rights Movements—shifting them to the sphere of contemporary art.5 AWC was also active in determining the role of museum personnel, participating in protests with curators and other employees that culminated in the unionization of MoMA’s professional staff. As the first museum in the US to unionize, the curators at MoMA took the lead in redefining their jobs, identifying more with artists and the creative process than with the wealthy and powerful members of their board.6 If many now consider White Columns and Artists Space the most visible remnants of the original alternative space movement, their 4

current role as ‘feeder schools’ for commercial galleries (rather than providing space for counter-cultural or underground experiments as per their original mandate) only begins to indicate just how much the agendas of these venues have evolved. The former was founded in 1970 as the 112 Workshop/ 112 Greene St. by artists Gordon Matta Clark and Jeffrey Lew as a space for post minimal and conceptual installations and performances and the latter was established in 1972 as a New York State Arts Council initiative to support emerging artists but both soon became beneficiaries of burgeoning government support for the arts.7 In 1978 the National Endowment for the Arts program director Brian O’Doherty established a new grant category ”artists’ spaces” and funding continued to increase in this area generating an increasing number of alternative spaces and producing an entire network devoted to “”alternative,’ nonmarket oriented artists and art works.”8 Although in the mid 90s, when Momenta opened its first space in Williamsburg the aesthetic-economic transformation of White Columns, Artists Space and their like was perhaps less ‘complete’ than today, there had, by 1980 already been several ‘anti-alternative spaces’—Colab, Fashion Moda and others9 that had organized themselves in direct opposition to what they considered the overprofessionalization and bureaucratization of their predecessors. Ironically these 80s groups also applied for and received funding earmarked for ‘artists spaces’ and used it to produce one off exhibitions rather than to establish more permanent venues.10 Yet by the early 90s when the NEA four were denied their peercommittee-awarded NEA grants by the Endowment’s chair John Frohnmayer, the first organizations to lose support were exactly these smaller, artist-run visual arts organizations.11 It should be no surprise that alternative spaces became increasingly institutionalized as a result of the demands placed upon them by their funders. But it was not just the requirements they were subject to as non-profits—to conform to laws governing the limitations placed on public money—that ultimately pushed alternative spaces to close or else drew them closer to the market. In fact it was a long and rather covert operation that paralleled the neoliberal defunding of social services. Grant Kester traces the funding arc of this period—a kind of golden age of alternative arts funding—in 1993, just as it was drawing to a close in his essay Rhetorical + Questions. Starting with the birth of the NEA in the 60s the same egalitarian, anti-market impulses that spawned many alternative art spaces aligned with the idea that funding for the arts was part of government

responsibility, along with health, education, and welfare. This presumed affinity continued even as Presidents Nixon and Reagan tried to appease the liberal establishment by increasing NEA subsidies while simultaneously defunding a broad range of social programs. In fact, as Kester sees it, alternative sector artists and administrators were actually able to obtain Endowment funding by identifying themselves and their needs with those who were being disempowered by the government and the capitalist system.12 “In effect, their survival depended on their capacity to construct narratives that positioned their own institutional activities in relation to a larger set of cultural goals associated with federal or private funding mandates.”13 In a process of what Kester calls strategic substitution, “the artist became the disenfranchised citizen in need of ‘empowerment,’” as alternative sector artists were positioned, like the urban poor, as an underserved group who were oppressed or ignored, in this case not by social programs but by the art market. In this way artists and administrators implemented for their own purposes language meant convince the citizens to amend the conditions of the poor and oppressed. Convinced they were qualified to stand in for various underserved populations and, through their work offer a ‘victim’s’ point of view on social issues, artists believed they and their work could serve as moral guide or conscience showing their audience what needed to be done to repair the social contract.14 Yet Kester goes on to reveal another, perhaps more important component of alternative sector funding. In order to insulate the NEA from congressional tampering, the Endowment’s drafters had left the actual implementation of the granting process—the procedures and guidelines governing daily operation—up to the appointed ‘experts’ in various funding categories. Because of this the artists and administrators who became designated authorities were able to play a crucial role in formulating these guidelines and helping to set in place the main decision-making committees as well as to determine that the actual selection of artist grantees was made entirely by other artists and arts administrators. As a result artists were responsible only to themselves and their own interests.15 While Kester’s essay presents a breathtaking expose of the tactical and ideological inner workings of the NEA’s alternative arts granting process he also castigates artists and arts administrators for, as he sees it, allowing themselves to become victims of this system. While it is true that, as he points out “owing in part to the very autonomy they were so anxious to achieve, alternative arts institutions were never called upon to question their own 5

Alternative Resistance (cont)

assumptions about audience and public perceptions of their cultural work”16 these were hardly the first artists to buy into the myth of the artist as the conscience of society. In fact when Richard Nixon increased NEA funding in exchange for the liberal establishment’s complicity on cuts to social programs it was the first of many steps that ultimately encouraged the alternative arts sector to present itself as a legitimate beneficiary of public funding by becoming the de facto representatives of the disempowered and oppressed.17 In the late 80s the myth of artist as society’s conscience coincided with a newly ascendant identity politics. One unintended consequence (unintended by the conservatives who increased the funding for art at the expense of social programs) was that, when the mostly egalitarian, progressive and inclusive alternative arts sector had control over their own funding decisions they offered grants to formerly marginalized groups of artists and their venues. It is no surprise then that once these expanded opportunities began to attract attention the right began to attack the NEA, using their self-defined standards of ‘decency and normality’ to judge the “aesthetics” of the artists in question. “When they caught sight of art that chronicled life at the receiving end of sexism, racism, and AIDs or that addressed sexual experience, especially homosexuality” the ’culture wars’ exploded despite the fact that NEA funds were for the most part peripheral to the creation of the works considered offensive.18 At the same time the NEA’s peer panel system was a primary target of conservative attacks. President G.H.W.Bush’s 1990 Independent Commission on the Endowment expressed “concern that the panels that make recommendations for grants had come to dominate NEA grant making,” and advocated reforms.19 In retrospect, many critics have deemed the impact of identity politics on art production as largely negative. Kester was one of many to point out that, if identity politics provided a platform for a more diverse range of artists and issues, it ignored how class or cultural privilege might also have an effect on an artist’s work no matter what their race, ethnicity or sexual preference.20 Yet there is another more troubling position that connects the rise of identity politics with the growth of neoliberalism. As the political landscape moved further right in the 80s, those in power were more than happy to reduce what were once considered struggles for equality to nothing more than competition between various cultural positions for pieces of the available pie. Creating a bait and switch that essentially sealed the liberal establishment’s Faustian pact with Nixon from the 70s, these conflicts all but eclipsed the egalitarian goals socially concerned artists had been working towards since the days of the AWC. 6

It was in the early 90s, not long after the culture war’s major battles, that Momenta’s then co-directors Eric Heist and Laura Parnes organized their first initiatives in New York—a number of guerilla-like pop up installations in Soho spaces left empty by recession-induced gallery closings as well as early migrations to Chelsea. Although they could not have been fully aware of the complexity and complicity that had resulted in what Kester called ‘vulgar identity politics,’ they were considering what could be learned in its midst and from its aftermath. Certainly the most recent funding cuts meant they needed to invent new forms of self-organized support for their Soho interventions, the first of their many novel approaches to the financial sustainability of artist-run spaces. As it turned out they were not destined to stay in Soho, which was soon to be the site of the Prada and Chanel ‘flagship’ stores. Rather, they recognized themselves in the newly developing neighborhood of Williamsburg, then still a nascent artists community, situated in a place that seemed far from the established cultural institutions and the art market. With the sense that a self-organized initiative was the best model for empowering artists, Momenta’s founders took it upon themselves to create a space for many new voices to enter the discourse despite the dearth of sources for support. As the 90s progressed the world began to shift on a global scale: a geopolitics that had been organized according to the seemingly binary oppositions of communism and capitalism broke apart. In this environment, identities of all kinds— national, sexual, colonial, racial—were disrupted or came to be seen as hybrid. Similarly, “naming oneself alternative sets up both distance from and bondage to dominant institutions “ and that the statement ‘We are not alternative to anything’ is a much-echoed sentiment that defies simple binary readings of power and its dynamics.”21 In this environment Heist and Parnes made efforts to reconceive their mission using other terminology. Also, since the term alternative can be applied to numerous aspects of art administration—locale, audiences, financial arrangements, among others—they defined their approach effectively day by day with boots on the ground, performing what Greg Sholette would call ‘extreme arts administration.’22 Fully aware of the irony within which they were operating—alternative spaces were originally created to support experimental practices that at the time did not have a home but by 1996 galleries, kunsthalles and even contemporary art museums found themselves in a race to be more alternative23 — they began to ask themselves and their collaborators difficult questions. Why be an artist now? What can artists do? What do artists know and what do they need to know?

More specifically, looking back at the conflicts as well as conflicts of interest that afflicted alternative spaces in the past, they also questioned their modes of work. How might methods of operation change the relationships between participants? What does it mean to have artists as managers and facilitators? One way to approach these questions for Parnes and Heist, who are themselves artists, was and continues to be working with a staff almost exclusively made up of artists. Such artists as Michael Waugh, Andy Monk and currently Kikuko Tanaka in addition to Heist and Parnes (Parnes left Momenta in 2011), as well as extreme administrator Caitlin Bright, have contributed their intelligence and creative labor to this continuing experiment. From the beginning it has been clear that Momenta has not followed the trajectory of Artists Space and White Columns. Unlike those venues, which tend to pack their boards with wealthy collectors and donors who often expect a certain amount of control over programming, Momenta’s board has been primarily composed of artists including, over the years, Michael Ashkin, Jodie Culkin, Rico Gatson, Christopher Ho, Peter Hopkins, Jon Kessler, Elisabeth Kley, Eric Moscowitz, Odili Donald Odita, Jessica Ann Peavy, Calvin Reid, Mira Schor, Jude Tallichet, Mickalene Thomas, Amanda Trager and (full disclosure) myself. While Momenta, like most small institutions, has applied for and received its share of grants, such support has not altered their mission “to provide opportunities for emerging and underrepresented artists of all ages, races, and ethnicities whose artistic practice often doesn’t fit into the commercial system.”24 A look at the work included in this publication confirms this position. For example the group exhibition Intangible Interferences curated by Denise Carvalho positions the artists as “interfering strangers” who use situations such as translation, geopolitics, economics and ecology to destabilize and disrupt pressures to conform. Thus the thematics of Carvalho’s show reinforces Momenta’s mission and as the first show of the 2010-11 season sets a tone and provides a de facto context for those that follow. The artists in the 2011 Winter Video Series further examine notions of conformity and its disruption. In Chelsea Knight’s exploration of the philosophy of capitalism she discovered that her desire to work across political boundaries—to find common ground with Tea Partiers, Ayn Rand enthusiasts and libertarians, among others—was ultimately in conflict with her own values. In contrast Patty Chang, by juxtaposing images of workers sleeping or resting

in their workplaces, challenges conventional representations of productivity as napping or even dreaming become an essential part of the labor process. Since the beginning of the financial crisis Momenta, like other small organizations unwilling to ‘professionalize’ by adopting the operational and managerial methods, and values of corporate culture (in this case the art market) has struggled to survive. Although the old model of the alternative arts space lost legitimacy and respect, as the crisis continues there is an urgent need to develop new forms of organizing that are more participatory and egalitarian, and for which Momenta can serve as a model. Their potent and persistent presence in New York since the early 90s offered hope, community and support to an ever-expanding group of artists and their supporters who brought their best and most collaborative energies to this incredible social laboratory.

1. Julie Ault, Alternative New York, 1965-1985 2. Ault, p. 29 3. http://eyeteeth.blogspot.com/2010/05/art-workers-coaltion-13-demands-and.html accessed October 2013 4. Ault, pp. 23-32 5. http://www.sculpture.org/documents/scmag98/sm-frnds.shtml accessed September, 2013 6. Connor, Maureen, “(Con)Testing Resources” in Making Art History: A Changing Discipline and It’s Institutions, edited by Elizabeth Mansfield, Routledge: NY, 2007 7. http://www.grantkester.net/resources/Rhetorical+Questions.pdf; originally published in Afterimage, January, 1993, accessed online September 2013 8. Kester, p. 10 9. Abagail Satinski, “The Art of Policy: The Work of Group Material”, Transmission, UK, 2013 10. Satinski 11. Kester, pp. 13-14 12. Kester p. 18 13. Kester p. 14 14. Kester, p. 16-17 15. Kester, p. 15 16. Kester, p. 16 17. Kester, p. 32 18. Lippard, Lucy, “Too Political? Forget it.” in Art Matters: How the Culture Wars Changed America, edited by Brian Wallis, Marianne Weems, and Philip Yenawine, Art Matters: New York, 1999 19. Kester, p. 16 20. Kester, p. 19 21. Ault, Julie “Of Several Minds over Time” in Playing by the Rules: Alternative Thinking/ Alternative Spaces, ed. and with a preface by Steven Rand and an introduction by Heather Kouris, New York: Apex Art, p. 95 22. http://www.gregorysholette.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/XAA.syllabus.pdf accessed October, 2013 23. Helgera, Pablo, “Alternative Time and Instant Audience (Public Program as an Alternative Space)” in Playing by the Rules: Alternative Thinking/ Alternative Spaces ed. By Steven Rand, New York: Apex Art, p. 23 24. http://www.momentaart.org/momenta-art-about-us.html accessed August 2013

Intangible Interferences Guest-curated by Denise CarValho September 17TH through November 1ST, 2010 Intangible Interferences was a group show of seven artists whose work examined the dynamics of resistance and the graying of meaning in politics, economics, language, and existence. By exploring the subtle forces of interference in situations of translation, geopolitics, economics, culture, ecology, and human experience, these artists have become, themselves, interfering strangers, further blurring the boundaries of perception. Artists included resingXruiz, xurban_collective, Christopher K. Ho, Jesal Kapadia, Susan Jahoda, and Harout Simonian. Grady Gebracht’s project, 62931–62943 records the oscillating music produced by the flow of electricity through the power-lines that cross the rural interior of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil. The lines, which consequently ignore property boundaries and ordinary travel routes, slicing through various panoramic scenes, appear and disappear en route to deliver the lifeblood of modernity to distant farms. Through a very abstract narrative, the video tells the story of sonic phenomenon set against agricultural time — a slower kind of time within which the local agrarian community functions. Christopher K. Ho’s performance and installation piece Accidental Racism (2010) creates an interference in real time. At the opening, a young, dreadlocked Caucasian male, seemingly stoned, wanders around the opening while cradling a chainsawcarved BET Award (the original designed in 2001 by graffiti pioneer Mare139 for the Black Entertainment Television network). A plaque affixed to the award identifies it as belonging to Jesse Owens, winner of four gold medals at the 1936 Berlin Olympics. Owens win was an ambivalent historical moment for Anglo Americans — but a watershed moment for African-American politics. In this piece, Ho presents political art as a genre, as something assimilated, borrowed, watered-down — it’s success not at all guaranteed. Susan Jahoda’s Excerpts from Serenade to the Photosphere (2008) is a series of digital prints of Internet images and texts that address the consequences of pollution on our planet’s environment. Juxtaposing diagrammatic language and poetry, Jahoda’s piece is rather eerie and somber, like a disaster about 8

to happen, gestured through sign language in a distance. In these intimate, framed pages, yellow becomes the basic background color, referencing the color of destructive clouds of polluting ammonium, sulfate and nitrate ions documented by NASA over the Korean peninsula, Japan, and the Rocky Mountains. In Ditto or ‘the same as what has been said’ (2009–present), Jesal Kapadia presents an ongoing series of digital prints that consists of pairs of images pulled from the Internet. The pieces evoke an uncanny formal resemblance to works by artists such as Marcel Duchamp, Joseph Beuys, Buckminster Fuller and Robert Smithson — pairing them with global non-art counterparts, for example a biogas kiln, or a pedal-operated water pump. The artist proposes that sometimes a translation or reference is so true that it unnerves the original. resingXruiz’s kinetic sound piece and installation, “Is the world flat?” (2010), muses on Thomas L. Friedman’s seminal book, The World is Flat, which examines globalization in the 21st Century. resingXruix, consisting of Patrick Resing and Jose Ruiz, has created this sound installation. The two-channel sound installation samples and morphs Friedman’s official English audio book and counters it with a pirated Spanish text-version, both sides narrated by the artists. Each audio track is projected through speakers that are hanging above a traditional, vintage, two-armed weight scale that weights the audio and electronic frequencies emitted from each speaker. In doing so, the artists emulate the premise of Friedman’s book by creating a balanced scale, as an allegory for an evenhanded globalization amidst the growing non-translatable aspects of culture and their relationship to capitalism. In Harout Simonian’s video documentation from an untitled performance, the artist tries to remain upright in a closed, black linoleum-lined space smeared with Vaseline. Socially, psychologically, or existentially abject, the attempt to take an upward position is constantly at odds with the conditions of the surrounding space. The body resists. Bodies are resistant; they inscribe, rather than are inscribed. Against its gravitational boundaries, the body is extension and distention, its own consumption, degradation, expulsion, and reinsertion.

xurban_collective’s video installation The Cracked Sea of Marble (2009) is part of the ongoing research about a sea’s role in the global trade and economy. In their single channel video, the xurban_collective describes the view from an imperial vista of the Marmara Sea located beyond the Topkapi Palace, in Turkey. The Marmara Sea has witnessed many catastrophes since Prokopius, in the sixth century; various earthquakes, coup d’états, punishments and executions on its islands. The subtle changes in the seascape remain impassive.

Denise Carvalho is a curator, art critic, and scholar. She has organized shows both in the US and internationally, and published articles in Art in America, Flash Art, ArtNexus and Sculpture, among others. In this group exhibition, Carvalho uses her diversity of experience and research to touch on a multitude of socio-political issues pertaining to how we as citizens of the world relate to each other within and across cultural, social, and geographical boundaries.

resingXruiz

Grady Gerbracht

Susan Jahoda

Is the world flat?, 2010 kinetic soundpiece and installation

62931-62943, 2007 Photo still and video installation

Excerpts from Serenade to the Photosphere, 2008, digital print

Harout Simonian Untitled, 2004, video with sound, 22 min (looped), 1 monitor and two digital prints 14" x 18"

Jesal Kapadia Ditto or “the same as what has been said,” 2009–ongoing, Archival pigment prints, 18" x 14.4"

Grady Gerbracht 62931-62943, 2007 Photo still and video installation

resingXruiz Is the world flat?, 2010 kinetic soundpiece and installation

Nina Lola Bachhuber Nachtschatten November 5th through December 19th, 2010 The crows remain in the forest because it is black. The branches are playing dead. — Herta Müller, Even Back Then, the Fox Was the Hunter Oscillating between cool abstraction and uncanny figuration, Bachhuber’s work shows sensitivity to materials expressed in an unsettling aesthetic. Surfaces of actual materials as well as layers of possible meaning are essential in her work, often involving a mix of revelation and concealment. Allusions to death and mortality are omnipresent in the artist’s work, though her sculptures seem to be alive, vivacious — surreal.

Nina Lola Bachhuber was born in Munich, Germany, and obtained her Masters of Fine Arts at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste in Hamburg. Bachhuber has exhibited her work widely, e.g. at UCLA Hammer Museum, The Drawing Center, P.S.1 /MoMA, Sculpture Center, Metro Pictures, Mary Boone and Lehmann Maupin Galleries in New York, The Moore Space, Miami, Von der HeydtMuseum, Wuppertal, Germany, Gallery Min Min, Tokyo, and the 7. Mercosul Biennial in Porto Alegre, Brazil. Her work is the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Bachhuber presented a large sculpture surrounded by an arrangement of black fabric banners hung on the wall. Upon closer inspection, one can see that these flags each have an individual arrangement of thick black hair sewn into their seams, lending each flag its specific character. While they are rigorously minimalist, being monochromatic and equally-sized, each flag presents itself as an individual, as if part of an eerie clan identity. Ornamental, primal, and elegant, the works are willfully fetishistic. In the center of the gallery, the artist placed Untitled, 2010. This large work incorporates two black branches that reach across the gallery floor — with furry and horned black creatures, the size of a human head, sitting on each. They appear to be some sort of hybrid animal species in conversation with each other, waiting for prey in a nocturnal forest, or simply allowing time to pass. In their rather amputated beauty, these surrealist figures reveal dark obsessions, enticing the viewer to reflect on existential states of mind, pagan ceremonies or secret societies. “Bachhuber’s mysterious assemblages evoke consciousness at the cusp between rationality and dreaminess—a condition when whimsy and harrowing fears, playful exuberance and startling frailty, are completely fused.” (Gregory Volk, Eight Paragraphs for Nina Lola Bachhuber, 2006)

Nina Lola Bachhuber Nachtschatten, installation view

Pamela Herron performing a Butoh solo piece inside Nina Lola Bachhuber’s installation “Nachtschatten”

Nina Lola Bachhuber Flags Untitled, 2008 Fabric and hair, dimensions variable

Winter Break January 7th through 16th, 2011 Winter Break was an exhibition of recent paintings by four artists who approach the painted image or object with a critical eye trained on notions of the sacred. Some of the paintings resist being read literally, others provide a complexly balanced image for contemplation and focus. But all of the work acknowledges the problem of culture, reference, and association within the field of abstraction as something to be respected, not rejected. These works don’t try to sidestep reality, they keep their eyes trained on it — even as they back towards the infinite.   Marina Adams’ Peace Paintings are based on Buddhist mandalas and are intended as images to provide focus and balance to the viewer. The references in the work are unambiguous: They are studies of esoteric traditions, of symbolic routes towards enlightenment; yet they are sincere. They record an artist’s conflicts and resolutions; they record an active engagement with form and color. This effort returns the paintings, circularly, to the moment of their inception, as materializations of a state of mind that often gets orphaned, stranded between the poles of secular and religious ideology.    Peter Hopkins’ Hinge Paintings are large door-like paintings that provide both an outside and an inside space, functioning as a literal allusion to another dimension. The outside, or public part, vocal and iridescent, is in itself a sufficient work. The inside, or private half, painted matte and withholding, may be exposed infrequently (or never), but it exists. While referring to medieval altarpieces, the paintings also allude to LP covers, both fold open to reveal their inner core and the promise of hidden meanings. Within this nexus of dualities, the works exist as things that must be entered by the viewer to fully engage the aura.   Robert Janitz considers paintings as non-sacred objects, or as objects with qualities that are equal to the environments that contain them and us — equal to walls, floors, ceilings, and the incidental marks and imperfections that those spaces present. The works diminish the centrality of painting as a sacred surface by activating the world that surrounds. Using diverse materials such as tulle and cardboard to provide simple illusions, Janitz creates that subtle vacillation that wakes us to what is seen.   Brooke Moyse references traditional landscape painting as a means to represent energy through a sacred space. The landscape acts 18

as a space to visualize energy as a living force that exists behind appearances. Loosely painted but specifically architectural, her paintings define an active space that — despite conflict — identify, harmonize, and balance.   Marina Adams is a painter living and working in New York and Parma, Italy. Her work has been exhibited extensively in the United States and in Europe. She had a one-person exhibition at Magazzino d’Arte Moderna in Rome, Italy and had a recent solo exhibition at CUE Art Foundation in NYC. She received her MFA from Columbia University and is a visiting professor of art at Rhode Island School of Design.   Peter Hopkins lives in Connecticut and works in Bushwick. His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally and he is currently represented by Christopher Grimes Gallery, Los Angeles.   Robert Janitz was born in Germany and currently lives and works in Bushwick, NY. His work has been exhibited extensively in Germany, France, The Netherlands, and Argentina. He participated in Erik Moskowitz’s and Amanda Trager’s video Cloud Cuckoo Land which was exhibited at Momenta in 2008.   Brooke Moyse lives and works in New York. She received an MFA from NYU in 2006 and a BA from Bard College in 2001. She had a solo exhibition at Norte Maar, in Brooklyn, in 2009. Her work has been included in group exhibitions at Storefront, Norte Maar, and Silvershed, in New York.

Marina Adams Peace, 2010 installation dimensions variable, acrylic on canvas

Robert Janitz (Untitled), 2010, 24" x 20", encaustic on canvas (Pawn size), 2010, 14" x 11", linen , encaustic on linen (Dover prize medal II), 2010, 24" x 20", enamel on linen (Ostia blank), 2010, 24" x 20", oil, enamel, tulle, staples on canvas

Brooke Moyse Turquoise Parallelogram, 2010 20" x 16", oil on canvas (left) Green Triangles, 2010 20" x 16", oil on canvas (right)

Marina Adams Peace, 2010 installation dimensions variable, acrylic on canvas

Peter Hopkins Untitled (black white), 2003 80" x 48" (closed), dimensions variable (open), fluids and fabrics on panel with fluorescent alkyd in frame (left)

Untitled (red yellow), 2003 80" x 48" (closed), dimensions variable (open), fluids and fabrics on panel with fluorescent alkyd in frame (right)

Video 2011 Marianna Ellenberg: January 20 through 30, 2011  Chelsea Knight: February 3 through 13, 2011  Amelia Saul: February 17 though 27, 2011    Erik Bünger: March 3 through 13, 2011    Patty Chang: March 17 through 27, 2011  During the months of January, February and March, Momenta Art presented the 2011 edition of its annual Winter Video Series; five brief exhibitions of works recently added to its video library. Each exhibition, lasting two weeks, featured a single artist. This year’s artists were Marianna Ellenberg, Chelsea Knight, Amelia Saul, Erik Bünger, and Patty Chang. Momenta’s video library program makes the works of over 60 artists who have shown at Momenta since 1991 available to the public for viewing. Visitors to the gallery may select and view any work from the library collection.

the divide inherent in a digital recording, and inserting the actual subjects into the space of the gallery.

Marianna Ellenberg presented Blossom (please!), a double-channel, live action video projection work. In this piece, scenes from Wes Craven’s 1972 film Last House on the Left are re-performed in a stripped down seaside landscape. The work re-edits a live rehearsal to reveal a close up view of female subjectivity as it emerges from the sadistic slasher genre to a bare bones video production.

On Sunday, March 6th, Erik Bünger presented the performance lecture The Third Man. Incorporating video projection and live performance, The Third Man explores the forces and influence that music and sounds have had on the world throughout history, imagining this influence as its own sentient being, The Third Man.

Alongside Blossom (please!), Ask/Tell was exhibited. This splitscreen video re-contextualizes the slogan “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” from its weighty political signification to durational performance. Repeating the phrases in a romantic landscape, the words pingpong back and forth, detournéd into meditative chant. In lieu of traditional openings, the artists presented special events at the gallery every other Sunday in February and March: On Sunday, January 30th, Marianna Ellenberg presented an audiovisual lecture to demonstrate her working process and investment in the power of the acousmatic voice, along with assistance by voice-over artist Melanie Neergaard. In this lecture, the underlying themes of fourth wave feminism, the mediated self and rehearsal as performance provide topical background to the two exhibition videos. On Sunday, February 6th, Chelsea Knight had participants from her project reciting their lines from the video. This performance challenges the voyeuristic impulse of the gallery-goer by removing 22

On Sunday, February 20th, Amelia Saul presented footage taken during an “introverted performance” previously held at the gallery. An ‘introverted performance’ is a six hour workshop devised by Saul including six to eight players who are both audience and performer simultaneously. The group, as a whole, decided on all activities, though democratic majority was not a requirement for action.

On Sunday, March 20th, Patty Chang gave a presentation exploring ideas of transforming the energy of spaces normally reserved for work. Using the incongruity of peaceful dreamers in environments that would ordinarily be full of frenetic energy and activity, Chang attempted to re-invigorate (or de-invigorate) these spaces and re-consecrate them as places of rest and repose. Marianna Ellenberg is a Brooklyn based artist working with the still and moving image. Her film/video and photographic work revolves around a re-imaging of female subjectivity and desire within visual abstraction and language play. Ellenberg’s work has been shown both locally and internationally, at such venues as Orchard Gallery, Art in General, The New York Underground Film Festival, LA Freewaves and EMAF in Germany For Don’t Tread on Me, Chelsea Knight collaborated with a multitude of participants, including members of the Tea Party, Ayn Rand enthusiasts, Libertarians, artists, and politicians, all with one thing in common: they are all in favor of capitalism. Through

a series of interviews, encounters, Greek-style choruses and other choreographed ensemble elements, both fiction and documentary, the videos, photographs and performances in the show explore the way politics are formed and articulated on the Right. Chelsea Knight (1976) was born in Vermont and lives and works in New York. She received her B.A. from Oberlin College and her M.F.A. from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Knight completed residencies at the Whitney Independent Study Program and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, and was a 2007 Fulbright Fellow in Italy. Solo exhibitions include: The University of Syracuse, Julius Caesar Gallery, Chicago, and the Fondazione Pistoletto, Biella, Italy. Knight has shown her work in group shows, screenings and performances at the Young Artists’ Biennial, Bucharest, the 10th Annual Istanbul Biennial, Les Rencontres Internationales, The Kitchen, Art in General, NY, The St. Louis Art Museum, Werkschauhalle Gallery, Leipzig, Vox Populi, Philadelphia, The Academy for Media Arts, Cologne, and Mount Tremper Arts, NY. In Amelia Saul’s video, 8:15 or The Stench, she attempts to psychically connect to the spirit of the moment Enola Gay released Little Boy over Hiroshima: August 6th, 1945 08:15, Japan Standard Time. This moment is chosen for its horror, its volume, and the paradoxical nonchalance with which one can speak of it in the present day US.  In this action, she posits a conception of consciousness not, like you or I, located in a person made of matter traveling through time, but one made of time traveling through matter. This ‘single-moment-being’ exists only a millisecond, but the length of its life could be measured with a ruler. Its consciousness travels across the matter of its particular instant like a ribbon of flame traveling over a piece of paper. In this flip of the position of matter and time, much is up for speculation. Using (and teasing) tools of video art and experimental filmmaking, Saul pays homage to the intensity of philosophical and political discourse in cinema verité and the video art of the 70’s and 80’s. Amelia Saul is a video artist and writer currently based in Brooklyn. She has lived for brief periods in Mexico City, Paris and

Shanghai; for longer periods in Changhua, Taiwan, and Berlin. She attended New York University for her BFA (2005) and MFA (2010). Erik Bünger presented The Third Man, a project existing both as a performance lecture and as a film. As a child my father told me about the movie: In a city somewhere, a man searches for another man. Everyone he meets tells him that his search is in vain, for the other man is already dead, but he refuses to give up and suddenly he believes he catches a glimpse of the other man’s face in a doorway. Then dad sat down in front of the piano and in his own tiptoeing kind of way he played ‘The Theme from the Third Man’. It made me dream of footsteps echoing in back alleys and a great, green shadow flickering by in the corner of my eye. Every time I heard that melody I had the peculiar feeling of someone observing me from a hidden viewpoint. — Excerpt from The Third Man Erik Bünger is a Swedish artist, composer, musician and writer living in Berlin and Stockholm. He works with recontextualizing and remixing media — appropriated from existing music and film — in performances, installations and web projects. Patty Chang examines the psychic and physical spaces of labor and production. By juxtaposing images of workers peacefully sleeping or resting the spaces where they work, Chang explores how a space, specifically the workplace, is affected by the energy present in that space. This exploration serves as a kind of refusal of production through not working and maybe even dreaming. This work also highlights the potential danger inherent in equating production with progress and self worth. Patty Chang is well known for her performative works, which deal with themes of gender, sexuality, language and empathy. Working predominantly in video Chang initially uses the medium to document her performances, often utilizing the camera’s potential to misrepresent. Her works often challenge viewers’ perceptions of what they see, frequently creating visual sleights of hand that highlight fantastical representations of “Asia”. 23

Chelsea Knight Performance stills, “Don’t Tread on Me”

Erik Bünger Performance still, “The Third Man

Amelia Saul Video still from “8:15 or The Stench”

Patty Chang Video stills from “Sleep”

Maureen Connor and the Institute for Wishful Thinking Artists in Residence for the US Government (Self-Declared) April 1st through May 8th, 2011 The Institute for Wishful Thinking (IWT) believes that the community of artists and designers possesses untapped creative and conceptual resources that could be applied to solving social problems. With this in mind they invited proposals from artists, architects and designers for residencies at government organizations and agencies at all levels. This website (www.theiwt. com) provides information about: • How government policy is made. • How interested applicants can use it to find an agency or organization to target with a proposal. • How individual interests might intersect with specific policy issues. During the month of April Momenta Art in Brooklyn served as the project space and information center. There the IWT hosted discussions and debates with policy experts and government administrators as well as proposal-writing sessions.

has shown that a request for wishes allows an organization the space to fantasize about its potential while also providing an opportunity to address its most pressing needs. Since the IWT works with organizations, not individuals, wishes are always directed toward a specific organizational event, goal or challenge. IWT does their best to grant as many wishes as they can, sometimes literally, sometimes a symbolically or metaphorically. While their primary goal is to be of help, they also accept wishes that offer critique. Artists in Residence for the US Government (self declared) takes a slightly different tack: the IWT has imagined its own wishes. IWT members are Bibi Calderaro, Maureen Connor, Andrea DeFelice, Susan Kirby, Matthew Mahler, Tommy Mintz, John Pavlou, Nathania Rubin and Gregory Sholette.

Submitted proposals were distributed widely. In addition to posting them on the website, the IWT published a book in which these proposals were interspersed with transcriptions from the debates and discussions that were hosted at Momenta. The book was then used to generate interest and funding for a pilot version of the project—placing artists in residence with the agency or department of their choice. The goal of the IWT is to develop a new model of support for artists and designers by creating a structure in which they are paid to serve as consultants to policymakers, community leaders and elected officials. The project as well as the resulting publication aims to increase understanding of the art making process and how it can contribute to society as well as encourage policy makers and the general public to think of artists as potential partners in a variety of circumstances. The IWT was founded in 2008 as an organization that works collaboratively with organizations to grant wishes that offer both practical assistance and possibilities for change. IWT’s experience 26

Maureen Connor and the Institute for Wishful Thinking Artists in Residence for the US Government (Self-Declared), Installation views

J. PASILA / PETER SCOTT June 2nd through June 20th, 2011

Prior to renovations of Momenta’s new space in Bushwick, Momenta presented the work of J. Pasila and Peter Scott. The work was chosen at this time because of its contextual relationship to the space itself and Momenta’s transition from Williamsburg to Bushwick. Peter Scott’s photographs chronicle the violent transition of Williamsburg from a relatively quiet neighborhood to the current land of high-rise condominiums and the concomitant selling of the area as “”Williamsburg lifestyle” while J. Pasila’s work reflects the histories of artists’ studio walls, somewhat wistful in this context, as most artists’ studios were forced to relocate from there (Williamsburg) to here (Bushwick). The raw walls and floors of Momenta still showed the scars of a manufacturing history, with layers of paint and resin leaving evidence of past tenants. This was a transitional exhibition in every sense. While Pasila’s images catalogue the residual evidence of apparently blank studio walls, Scott’s photographs of luxury condo construction sites document the disorienting nature of a built environment in “transition.” Although the appearance of each body of work suggests very different sensibilities, the stillness in both implies a preoccupation with the ongoing interplay between physical site and displacement. In Peter Scott’s part two of Pardon Our Disappearance, the influence of lifestyle culture on urbanism is examined through photographs of luxury residential construction projects. Contrasting imagery of idealized lifestyles shown in luxury construction site banner ads with the reality of scaffolding and sidewalk sheds that the ads often serve to mask, these photographs document the disorienting nature of a built environment being transformed to suit an economy increasingly devoted to leisure. Because banner ads and construction sites are temporary, this subject is somewhat ephemeral. What may in the long run appear to be a fleeting moment in the perpetual reshaping of the city now represents the culmination of the effect of the boom years on its many neighborhoods. As a photographic record of this process, the photographs included in Pardon Our Disappearance, Part Two are part documentary and part conceptually based, an informal archive rooted in perceptual ideas. 28

J. Pasila’s The studio series (2009 and ongoing) involves photographing interior walls of artists’ studios, enlarging or sharpening their seemingly blank expanses to reveal layered traces of human activity: residual layers of mark-making, built up over time — traces of drawing, constellations of pinholes, and occasional scribbled text. By focusing a viewer’s attention on walls which bear not only the weight of their construction but also the record of time passing upon them, Pasila aims to render time visible, condensed onto an architectural plane. The image oscillates between being read as a solid wall or as a weightless expanse of space. If “architecture presents the drama of construction silenced into matter, space, light,”1 then photography seems an ideal medium through which to explore the space of this silence. J. Pasila works primarily in photography and photo installation. She graduated from OCAD, Toronto and continued her studies between the Department of Architecture and Department of Video at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, Germany. Her work is currently on view as part of The plates of the present, photogram editions, Paris, organized by Thomas Fougeirol and Jo-ey Tang and is included in the 30 x 30 Collection curated by Tilman. Earlier exhibitions include Momenta Art, the Convent of St. Cecilia, and Carriage Trade in NYC. J is a two-time fellow of the Macdowell Colony and has attended arts residencies in Iceland and Finland. She is the recipient of several grants and awards including a travel grant from the MacArthur Foundation and an Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts Studio membership. J currently divides her time between Brooklyn and the EU. Peter Scott is an artist, writer, curator, and director of the non-profit gallery Carriage Trade. His work has been exhibited in the U.S. and Europe, including one-person exhibitions in the U.S., U.K., Holland, France, and Belgium. Recent exhibitions include Rectangle, Belgium, and Martos Gallery, 3A Gallery, Sometimes (works of art), Marianne Boesky Gallery, and Momenta Art, New York. His writing has appeared in Artscribe, ArtUS, Zing Magazine, artnet, The Architect’s Newspaper, and Art Monthly as well as several exhibition catalogues. His projects have been featured in various publications including Artscribe, artforum.com, The New York Times, The New Yorker, The New York Observer, Time Magazine, Grey Magazine, Huffington Post, and artnet magazine. 1. Juhani Pallasmaa, The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses, John Wiley and Sons, Ltd., 2005, pg 46.

J. PASILA / PETER SCOTT Installation views

Peter Scott Fire Escape / Chandelier, 2009 archival inkjet print, 19" x 14" (top left) Big Ball, 2010 archival inkjet print, 19" x 14" (bottom left) Tinkering, 2010 archival inkjet print, 19" x 14" (right)

J. Pasila Studio2, 2009 archival inkjet print, 44" x 56"

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