Less Like An Object More Like The Weather
Hessel Museum of Art
The Center for Curatorial Studies presents exhibitions and projects curated by second-year students in its graduate program in curatorial studies and contemporary art. The students have organized these exhibitions and projects as part of the requirements for the master of art’s degree.
For the spring of 2013, the fourteen participating students have elected to present their individual curatorial projects simultaneously in the Hessel Museum of Art. As an unprecedented gesture of institutional engagement through collectivity, all exhibitions and adjacent programming come together under one title.
John Cage characterized his longtime collaboration with Merce Cunningham by stating: “It’s less like an object and more like the weather. Because in an object, you can tell where the boundaries are. But in the weather, it’s impossible to say when something begins or ends.” The ethos of the students’ collaboration reflects Cage’s sentiment and prompts the viewer to experience the venture’s heterogeneity less as an object to be assimilated, and more as a movement towards a climate of engagement.
A student-initiated publication will be designed by Isabelle Vaverka and Lu Liang. It will feature contributions from the curators and participants of the spring curatorial projects and be available for sale at CCS Bard.
Student-curated exhibitions at CCS Bard are made possible with support from the Rebecca and Martin Eisenberg Student Exhibition Fund; the Mitzi and Warren Eisenberg Family Foundation; the Audrey and Sydney Irmas Charitable Foundation; the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation; the Board of Governors of the Center for Curatorial Studies; and by the Center’s Patrons, Supporters, and Friends.
Object Permanence considers a selection of works from the Marieluise Hessel Collection, through a socio-economic lens that is both theoretical and grounded in current financial realities. Curated by four second-year students who have worked extensively with the collection, the exhibition runs parallel to the curators’ study of current research from the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College.
Pairing two seemingly different artistic practices, CROSS//ROADS aims to create a productive confusion that pushes the viewer towards a nuanced reading of both the art objects on display and the multi-layered set of ideas about abstraction, history, and artistic practice they represent.
Don’t blame anyone includes works by artists whose practices pay particular attention to process as opposed to progress, overemphasizing ways of engaging with ordinary objects and activities.
Interrogating modes of representation and choreography itself, the project foregrounds the process of negotiation and dialogue integral to the creation of dance.
Four performances occupy formal spaces of law and become vehicles for poetic political action.
Exercises in an architecture that extends to the human body.
Blueprints engages the organizational forces of material and dematerialized architectures by considering the physical and psychical distance between the drawn and the built, the architectural representation and its muse.
Terms & Conditions of Use examines the reciprocal agreements of networked communities, and how they alter artistic methods of resistance. The exhibition presents strategies for technologically embedded and ethically effective structural critiques.
We took the image and put the sound too loud expands the framework of representing politics by bringing together the artist, the document, and the writer to readjust our expectations of each source.
Ken Okiishi’s installation inhabits a space of becoming, in which the material limits of externally sourced memory are confronted by gestures of the body. Television, obsessively recorded and collected, but never watched, becomes the support surface for hovering registers of recording brought into porous contact.
This project unfolds over the course of an academic year and uses repetition to create a system for curating within CCS Bard. Multiple curatorial strategies disperse authorship across the institution’s administrative process and change the use of selection criteria in curating.
Salvaged materials are altered just slightly, reproductions of mundane items are treated with a painterly touch, and drawings are turned quasi-sculptural.
Are You In? presents a site-specific intervention into the student lounge at CCS Bard by the Spanish architectural collective Zuloark.
A functioning museum bookshop with a display structure by Studio Manuel Raeder produced within the spring 2013 CCS Bard thesis exhibitions and projects.