The Museum is closed for installation until January 22 which is Opening Night of Sean Landers: 1991-1994, Improbable History and Stephen Prina: Modern Movie Popin the Main Galleries and Xavier Cha in The Front Room. You can stay connected to the Contemporary by visiting this blog, social networking sites, and the Museum’s website. Click here for all the ways to stay connected while we are closed.

Read the blog posted on saintlouisartmap.org. Find out about the Piñata Closing Party, the event to mark the end of the exhibition For the blind man in the dark room looking for the black cat that isn’t there.

Mariana Castillo Deball / Tessa Rehkop

Mariana Castillo Deball was born in 1975 in Mexico City, and she currently lives and works in Amsterdam and Berlin. Her Klein Bottle Piñata (2009) is being presented as part of the current exhibition For the blind man in the dark room looking for the black cat that isn’t there. The gigantic, blue, Klein bottle-shaped piñata hangs over the Contemporary’s performance space allowing viewers to examine the curious object. It is made out of paper máché and is larger than life. A Klein bottle is a non-orientable surface, meaning the inside and outside cannot be distinguished. This is similar to a Mobious strip, except that a Klein bottle has no boundary. What’s inside the Piñata is a mystery and will be revealed the last day of the show at the Piñata Closing Party held at the Contemporary on Sunday, January 3 from 4:00 – 6:00 pm. Guests will be allowed to take swings at the piñata to break it open!

Falke Pisano / Tessa Rehkop

Falke Pisano was born in 1978 in Amsterdam, where she currently lives and works. Her work, Chillida (Forms and Feelings) (2006), is being shown as part of the current exhibition For the blind man in the dark room looking for the black cat that isn’t there. It consists of a video projection of the artist looking through a book photographs. These photographs are of sculptures by Eduardo Chillida captured by amateur photographer David Finn, who travels all over the world to find them. He eventually publishes the sculptures in a book in the late 1990’s. Using two separate projections, Pisano flips through Finn’s book of photographs while providing her commentary. The artist believed it was important to describe what she felt the moment she first looked at the photographs and their descriptions. Some of the sculptures Pisano views with appreciation because they are what she describes as “strong and natural” just as she herself would like to be. Pisano begins to draw lines and create her own shapes using images of the sculptures, so the viewer doesn’t just hear her interpretation but can now see it also. Click here for the gallery guide.

For the blind man in the dark room looking for the black cat that isn’t there is on view for only a short time longer. It closes on Sunday, January 3, 2010. You can read a review of this major group show that was published in the December issue of Art in America here!

Rachel Harrison / Tessa Rehkop

Rachel Harrison was born in 1966 in New York City, where she currently lives and works. Her work, Voyage of the Beagle, is named after a journal by Charles Darwin and is currently being displayed as part of the current exhibition For the blind man in the dark room looking for the black cat that isn’t there. It consists of fifty-eight photographs of a wide variety of characters. Lining the length of two entire walls, Harrison’s images range from 5000-year old stone figures to a Barbie doll to a figure of Elvis. The series seems to be a playful, humorous way to represent gaps in culture from the past and present but also holes that exist between cultures even today. Along with these images Harrison presents three abstract sculptures that are coated with the artist’s signature pearlescent paint.

Jimmy Raskin / Tessa Rehkop

Jimmy Raskin was born in 1970 in Los Angeles where he currently lives and works.  Since 1989, the artist has been studying, through various mediums, the idea of a universe split between the Poet and the Philosopher. Focusing on the Prologue of Nietzsche’s philosophical novel, Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883-85), Raskin interprets Zarathustra’s understanding of how to move forward as the New Being –the merging of the philosopher and the poet into the Philosopher-Poet. His latest multi-media sculpture and video installation, The Annunciation, is part of the current exhibition For the blind man in the dark room looking for the black cat that isn’t there. In what the artist calls a “fighting sculpture”, Raskin continues his dual mode of expression between the Philosopher-Poet and the Poet with a battle scene represented by black vinyl silhouettes of an eagle-serpent and a donkey reflecting how the artist struggles with art as a form of critical thought while still trying to be poetic. In the past, Raskin has represented this duality through a series of lectures, audio-visual performances, publishing a book entitled The Poet, The Poltergeist & The Hollow Tree, and producing countless texts, drawings, diagrams, sculptures and cartoons.  His research seems to be seeking truth by combining the thinking of the Philosopher and the Poet-in-Part in order to have more than just faith in meaning.

Bruno Munari and David William / Tessa Rehkop

Two artists that truly capture the theme of “not knowing” in the current exhibition For the blind man in the dark room looking for the black cat that isn’t there are Bruno Munari and David William. Bruno Munari was born in 1907 in Milan. He was an artist, graphic designer, industrial designer, poet, and illustrator. After a seventy year career, gaining the title of “founding father of Italian design,” Munari died in Milan in 1998. In a sequence of twelve grainy black and white photographs entitled Seeking comfort in an uncomfortable armchair, Munari shows a man attempting twelve different ways to sit in an armchair while trying to read a newspaper. The man never seems to figure out the correct way to sit. This reflects Munari’s curiosity about the most common things in life.

David William is a composite name of graphic designers David Reinfurt and Will Holder. David Reinfurt was born in 1971 in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. He works as an independent graphic designer, writer and critic in New York. Will Holder was born in 1969 in Hatfield. He works as a writer, editor, performer, and book designer in London. Together they designed a game, Towards an Intuitive Understanding of the Fourth Dimension, to help children understand the complex idea of the fourth dimension: time in relation to the other three dimensions. Players are presented with several squares and a timer, but they are given no rules. So by having no previous experience with the game, players must develop their own rules. By not knowing how to play the game visitors of the current exhibition can get an idea of what it’d be like to experience common everyday objects for the first time, like how to sit in an armchair.

Click here to view Munari’s gallery guide and here for William’s gallery guide.

Eric Duyckaerts / Gilian Rappaport

Eric Duyckaerts was born in 1953 in Llege, Belgium and currently lives and works in Nice, France. Working in the disciplines of both video and visual arts, Duyckaerts employs mixed media to explore analogs like the square and labyrinth, as well as questions of advanced logical analysis. Duyckaerts uses humor to situate his persistent curiosity and exploration into preconceived systems of knowledge. He questions human construction of the world by investigating pattern making and ways of thinking, including functions of symbolism, repetition, process, meaning, and use.

Duyckaerts’ 1993 exhibition, The Hand with Two Thumbs, explored the precise numbers of bones present within all human arms, hands, and fingers. Noting that the human hand has five digits, namely, four fingers and one thumb, Duyckaerts proposes the possibility of two thumbs, totaling six digits, per hand, through a lecture, video, a selection of drawings, and a cast model of a hand possessing two thumbs. The effect is an alluring combination of humor and gravity into a proverbial “Why not?” In For the blind man in the dark room looking for the black cat that isn’t there, film depicts Duyckaerts posing a seemingly nonsensical argument based on a network of undeniably logical ideas.

For images of Duyckaerts’ work, click here. To view the gallery guide, click here.

Dave Hullfish Bailey / Tessa Rehkop

Dave Hullfish Bailey was born in 1963 in Denver, Colorado, and he currently lives and works in Los Angeles. His work To do with a wide spot along a dusty road crossing a dry channel, between the old end of Old Red and the dead end of the New West is being presented at the Contemporary in the current exhibition For the blind man in the dark room looking for the black cat that isn’t there.  This project, consisting of a boat trailer with varying types of equipment ranging from a garden hose to a computer scanner, was designed for the purpose of exploring the Colorado River Delta.  Bailey is interested in the idea of a river as something that organizes material, constantly shifting and re-shifting it around in a way that’s not random, but still hard for us to understand.  He describes the work as existing between the gap of organizing things in a rigid, rational way and a more organic, natural way. This gap is limiting but we can also take pleasure from it because understanding that there is a gap, we can develop our own ways of understanding. 

Click here to hear more of Bailey’s explanation of his work and here to view the gallery guide.