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.

Coming up this Wednesday, November 18, the Contemporary’s Chief Curator, Anthony Huberman, will give a special lecture about his curatorial process behind the exhibition For the blind man in the dark room looking for the black cat that isn’t there. Huberman will present artists, artworks, and his ideas about art. Following the lecture will be a film screening of Fischli & Weiss’ “The Way Things Go.” Peter Fischli & David Weiss are both artists in the exhibition For the blind man… pursuing “their urge to understand the world by asking large metaphysical and ethical questions about the human condition.” The lecture and the film screening are both free. The evening begins at 6:00 pm.

Marcel Broodthaers & Sarah Crowner / Gilian Rappaport

Belgian painter, sculptor, printmaker, draughtsman, and filmmaker, Marcel Broodthaers, was born in Brussels in 1924. He began his career as a poet, with connections to the Belgian Surrealists such as René Magritte. After living as a poverty-stricken poet for twenty years, he decided to become an artist, though he had no artistic training. A rather ironic gesture, on the invitation to his first solo show in 1964 at the Galerie St. Laurent in Brussels, he explained: “I, too, wondered if I couldn’t see something and succeed in life…The idea of inventing something insincere finally crossed my mind and I set to work straightaway.” Often using found or discarded materials, he exhibited banal objects, words, lettering, child-like drawings, books, catalogues, and prints on a range of surfaces from canvases to plastic relief. Between 1957 and 1967, he began making short films.

Broodthaer’s Interview with a Cat is exhibited in For the blind man…, allowing visitors to listen to his 1970 recording of his attempts to understand artwork by asking a cat whether it is “good.” This recording took place within his Musée d’Art Moderne, Département des Aigles (Museum of Modern Art, Department of Eagles), created in 1968 in his home in Brussels and later transported to a variety of institutions. Consisting of a series of “sections” appearing at different times and locations, these exhibitions of work were created under imaginary departments and housed neither a permanent collection nor location. Each section held reproductions of works of art, wall inscriptions, and film-elements, complete with labels and a catalogue. This work illustrates Broodthaers innovative, pioneering exploration of the art context and dispute of the function of art institutions by appropriating and altering them.

Born in 1974 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Sarah Crowner currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. She has participated in international exhibitions for the past decade, most recently, in Berlin, New York, Lisbon, and Paris.

In For the blind man…, Sarah Crowner has re-released both issues of The Blind Man, a small satirical magazine published by Marcel Duchamp, Beatrice Wood, and Henri-Pierre Roche. On a very different note, Crowner had her first New York solo exhibition, Paintings and Pots, earlier this year at the Nicelle Beauchene Gallery. The exhibition presented Crowner’s paintings and hand-built ceramic vessels, both of which deeply question the nature of Modernist art. The former revolutionizes the strict, systematic methods of 1950s-era hard-edged painting through her sewed combination of painted canvas panels with blocks of monochromatic fabrics and raw linen. On the other hand, her freeform vessels tread an intriguing line between traditional cultural craft and contemporary sculpture.

To explore Paintings and Pots, click here.

Click here to view the gallery guides.

In preparation for National Portfolio Day at Washington University, the New Art in the Neighborhood (NAN) students were treated to a visit by artist, Professor, and Executive Director of the Santo Foundation, Gary Passanise. 

Gary provided the NAN students with numerous insights into the portfolio review process, sharing what he looks for when he reviews portfolios and discussed the best ways to highlight their strengths, giving special attention to content selection. He also talked about how good artwork is distracted by bad presentation. 

He then gave a demo on an easy and efficient way to mount drawings that instantly transformed the space around the work and gave them room to visually breathe. 

Gary also generously spoke about his own art work, the reflections, research, and personal thought processes that go into what he creates. I personally enjoyed this very much as it always fascinates me the myriad of ways that artists operate and arrive at what they do.   

The day ended with Mr. Passanise taking the time to personally review some of the student’s portfolios and giving individualized feedback. 

The students asked thoughtful questions, and I think in the end some of the pressure of what can be an anxious and daunting experience was alleviated. Thanks Gary!

Matt Mullican and Patrick van Caeckenbergh / Gilian Rappaport

Berlin-based American artist Matt Mullican works in a diverse range of media, from drawing and sculpture, to electronic media, installation, and even performance art. His pervasive use of hypnosis contributes to his overall exploration of the subjective and the restrictions and benefits of separating creativity and rationality. He is well known for his long-time practice of creating series of charts, documenting his un-evidenced perspective on the origin and nature of life as we know it. It’s an elaborate attempt at duplicating externally the large network of internal processes that contribute to individual reception of universal signs and symbols. In For the blind man…, viewers enter into a complex world of Mullican’s seemingly comprehensible systems, only to find themselves deep within the artist’s distinctly personal, illogical universe.

For his performance work, as seen in the 2008 Whitney Biennial, Mullican maintains a hypnotic state of trance for multiple hours at a time, though this is expressed in a range of behaviors: from pouring himself coffee, repeating phrases ranging from curses to emotional outcries, or even using black acrylic ink to draw or paint on a range of surfaces. Click here to watch one of Matt Mullican’s performances.

Conceptual artist Patrick van Caeckenbergh, was born in 1960 in Aalst, Belgium and lives and works in Sint-Kornelis-Horebeke, Belgium. Through both sculpture and collage, van Caeckenbergh presents his unique perception of the world through his eccentric, uncontrollable desire to collect and order. In effect, his work emerges with surreal, fantastic answers to the consideration of broad, epistemological questions.  Like Mullican, van Caeckenbergh’s complex systems are based on his own personalized system of random ordering, rather than any rational logic or pre-determined codification.

The Bum, a 1995 collage by van Caeckenbergh, is a representation of the earth as a digestive system. As a pair of buttocks discharges clouds of gas into the atmosphere, it is continuously fed by pairs of winged hands. The detailed complexity of the work likens it to an intricate ancient manuscript, with references to philosophers, writers, and poets, and oral tradition in general. Though often producing creations that are literally unbelievable, his unbounded search for solutions is incredibly alluring. Click here to see The Bum and other van Caeckenbergh images.