The Last Newspaper
06.10.2010 - 09.01.2011
New Museum, 235 Bowery New York, NY 10002, USA
At the turn of the twentieth century, in the dawn of the machine age, newspapers were everywhere and wire services were feeding their hunger for the latest information. In their rush to embrace the future, the Cubists discovered a rich artistic medium: the newspaper. The Surrealists followed suit, and by World War I newspapers had become an accepted material integrated with painting, collage, and graphic design. Throughout the 1950s, artists such as Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns incorporated newspapers into their work not only for the iconic texture of the printed page, but also as a neural charge from the real world. By the 1960s-when this exhibition's chronology begins-the use of the newspaper in fine art was no longer a novelty; it had become a standard source for both images and language.The artists in this exhibition continue the exploration of the newspaper, but their focus lies in the ideological rather than the purely physical properties of the daily press. They use the newspaper as a platform to address issues of hierarchy, attribution, contextualization, and editorial bias. By disassembling and recontextualizing elements of the newspaper, such as the construction of graphics and text, the artists on view take charge of and remake the flow of information that defines our perception of the world. At its simplest, the artistic impulse that largely informs this exhibition is one of reaction and appropriation; the newspaper provides a stimulus and is itself incorporated into the final artwork.In today's culture, newspapers have to move as quickly as possible to compete with the increasing barrage of information on the internet. In print, it takes twenty-four hours to issue a correction. Online, credibility is rolled out in nanoseconds. People make and share the news in citizen-powered, peer-to-peer structures that can create and destroy consensus in hours. If artists were some of the first to begin to question the structure of the news, we have now reached an epoch where the public as a whole is empowered to police (and become) the press.It is in this context that a selection of collectives and agencies has partnered in this exhibition. If the artwork assembled in the galleries is dedicated to deconstructing the power and possibilities of the press, then the invited participants are engaged in finding new (and perhaps more holistic) ways of describing the world. Four partners are in residence on the museum's third floor inhabiting a set of flexible offices designed by Blu Dot. Latitudes, the Barcelona-based curatorial office, and a diverse team lead by Joseph Grima and Kazys Varnelis/Netlab, are on site producing weekly newspapers. The Center for Urban Pedagogy and StoryCorps are both prototyping new models for sharing and shaping discourse. Beyond these four residencies, the exhibition is animated by the Philadelphia-based Slought Foundation with kiosks, a reading room, and a discussion area spread throughout the exhibition and dedicated to a reexamination of Emmanuel Kant's essay "Perpetual Peace." All the partners seek to wade through tides of information in order to find new ways of making the contemporary world more legible. Their activities are an example of citizen journalism, as well as forums for the examination and structuring of something aspiring to be truth."The Last Newspaper" is co-curated by Richard Flood and Benjamin Godsill.  |
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Duration:
Oct 6, 2010 to Jan 9, 2011
Directions:
http://www.newmuseum.org/about/
Partner organizations and project productions
Center For Urban Pedagogy
Founded in 1997, Brooklyn-based CUP is a nonprofit organization that uses art, design, and visual culture to improve public participation in urban planning and community design, particularly among historically underrepresented communities. For this exhibition, CUP will present work from the Envisioning Development Toolkits program. Created in partnership with designers and community organizations throughout New York City, the toolkits are
interactive teaching tools that demystify complex topics about land use and development. Organizers use them to reach their constituents and build their own advocacy campaigns around such topics as affordable housing and zoning. In this exhibit, CUP s toolkits will be on view, and CUP staff will conduct workshops with the completed Affordable Housing Toolkit, as well as field test hands-on activities from the forthcoming Zoning Toolkit.
StoryCorps
Brooklyn-based StoryCorps gathers the life stories of Americans by having close friends and family members interview each other in specially designed recording stations placed across the country. Since 2003, StoryCorps has collected and archived more than 30,000 interviews from more than 60,000 participants. StoryCorps Conversations are preserved at the American Folklife Center and at the Library of Congress, and shared through weekly
broadcasts on NPR s Morning Edition. For this exhibition, StoryCorps will use the New Museum s visitor experience to research and rapidly prototype new ways to make their hundreds of thousands of hours of recorded information more readily available to the public.
Slought Foundation
This Philadelphia-based experimental organization, founded in 2002 by Aaron Levy, engages the public in dialogue about cultural and socio-political change through collaborations with cultural producers, communities, universities,and governments. For this exhibition, Slought will animate the entire New Museum with discursive displays about their Perpetual Peace Project, which explores Immanuel Kant?s essay on the idea of peace with social theorists and political practitioners. Media stations in the interstitial spaces of the museum will accompany a shared community arena in the fourth-floor gallery intended for public programming, and a reading room retreat between the third-and fourth-floor galleries. For this exhibition, Slought and its partner institutions, including the European Union National Institutes of Culture and United Nations University, have collaborated with architect and designer Ken Saylor, as well as filmmakers Laura Hanna, Alexandra Lerman, and Project Projects.
Latitudes
Latitudes, a Barcelona-based curatorial office founded in 2005, will act as instigators and connectors between the various artworks, departments, and other participants of The Last Newspaper. They will conceive, report, write, edit, design, and print a weekly newspaper THE LAST POST / THE LAST GAZETTE / THE LAST REGISTER... cataloguing the events and discussions that will take place in the gallery spaces during the duration of the
exhibition. This free newspaper will be distributed to museum visitors, and a collected volume of all of the issues will serve as a record of the exhibitions proceedings.
Joseph Grima and Kazys Varnelis/Netlab
Joseph Grima is the current editorial director of Domus magazine and the former director of the Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York. Kazys Varnelis the director of the Networked Architecture Lab at the Columbia Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. Along with an expanded network of collaborators, Grima and Varnelis will create The New City Reader: A Newspaper of Public Space in a performance-based editorial residency at the New Museum. This residency will transform a portion of the exhibition space into a forum for discussion as well as an editorial office. Grima, Varnelis, and their collaborators will publish a weekly publication that will be distributed in the galleries and will also be posted on walls around Manhattan allowing for open public reading. Judith Bernstein, Are You Running With Me Jesus?, 1967, Charcoal and mixed media on paper, 40 x 26 in. Courtesy The Box.
Angel Nevarez and Valerie Tevere
Nevarez is an artist, musician, and lecturer in the Department of Art, Culture, and Technology at MIT. Tevere is an artist and Associate Professor of Media Culture at the City University of New York / College of Staten Island. From 2001- 2008, Nevarez and Tevere worked under the collaborative name neuroTransmitter. Together, Nevarez and Tevere will present A Dutiful Scrivener (2010) which looks at the framework of the obituaries section of The New York Times. Through an interview with Bill McDonald, Times Obituaries Editor, A Dutiful Scrivener takes viewers through the journalistic criteria of posthumous representation, writing style, judgment, newsworthiness, and the obituary to be written. How might we critically reflect upon this form of writing, its limitations and word count, in order to sum up a life?
Jeffrey Inaba/C-Lab
New York-based architect Jeffrey Inaba will be working in collaboration with C-Lab, a think tank he directs at Columbia Universitys Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation which studies urbanism and architecture and makes policy recommendations, to animate the galleries by examining the role of weather in the news. The focus will be on weather as the single element in newscasts that is simultaneously predicative, interactive (with other stories at the top of the hour news broadcasts), and regularly featured on the front page of newspapers.
Jacob Fabricius/Old News
Jacob Fabricius, director of the Kunsthalle Malmo in Sweden, will continue his five-year-old practice of inviting artists to create newspapers that are themselves compilations of newspaper articles and advertisements gathered over time. Fabricius will present past examples of Old News as well as a new issue, commissioned by the New Museum for this exhibition.
Blu Dot
Blu Dot has created prototypes for self-assembly office furniture. Exhibition partner organizations can select from the available parts to create their workspaces from the central storage unit displayed within the gallery. The furniture is a combination of off-the-shelf parts and custom hardware.
ARTISTS
Alighiero e Boetti;Judith Bernstein; Pierre Bismuth; Andrea Bowers; Francois Bucher; Sarah Charlesworth; Luciano Fabro; Robert Gober; Hans Haacke; Karl Haendel; Rachel Harrison; Thomas Hirschhorn; Emily Jacir; Larry Johnson; Mike Kelley; Nate Lowman; Sarah Lucas; Adam McEwen; Aleksandra Mir; Adrian Piper; William Pope.L; Allen Ruppersberg; Dexter Sinister; Dash Snow; Rikrit Tiravanija; Wolfgang Tillmans; and Kelley Walker.
SPECIAL PROJECTS
Rachel Chandler
Jacob Fabricius
MEDIA CONTACTS:
Gabriel Einsohn, Communications Director
press@newmuseum.org
Andrea Schwan, Andrea Schwan Inc.
andrea@andreaschwan.com
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October 2010
