CCS BARD

I am Yours is a new project by Bernd Krauss, the fall 2008 artist-in-residence at the Center for Curatorial Studies. The centerpiece of the project is a quaint wooden shed situated on the grounds of the Center on the Bard College campus in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York. Built by the Amish and purchased locally in nearby Germantown, this type of shed is conventionally used to store gardening tools.  In the context of Krauss’ residency, however, the shed will be transformed into a studio, a curatorial space, and has the potential to gain other new and unexpected functions.

Krauss will use the shed as a studio for producing artwork inspired by the immediate environment, both from the ecology of the Hudson Valley setting and from the institutional context of the Center for Curatorial Studies. Beyond the shed’s function as a site of artistic production, it will also operate as a curatorial space, as determined by Krauss in collaboration with students at the Center during the course of his residency.

Krauss’ strategies grow organically and collaboratively from the particular context of their formation. Thus, the shed will serve as a platform from which ideas and projects can develop, and literally as a meeting place for Krauss, for the students, and for the larger community. The residency is structured as an open question about the relationship between curatorship and artistic production, a relationship at times in tension with creative expression. Krauss’ space places artistic process and collaboration between artist and curator at the center of its activity, allowing the art’s development to be open and reactive to the particularities of the context and locale of its making.

Krauss’ practice has in recent years centered upon the artist residency programs that have sustained his livelihood and his cultural productivity. In past residencies, Krauss’ approach to the institution to which he has been invited, and to that institution’s public, has employed strategies both playful and willfully irritating, toying with expectations and with protocol. Often, Krauss has lived near or within the spatial installations which he is producing. Hence, the installation operates on its own terms as well as constructing a functional space for producing other works across media such as painting, sculpture, drawing, video, photography, and performance. His works tend toward the seemingly amateurish, whether a shoddy sculpture or a video broadcast in which Krauss acts as commentator on local events in a style recalling a local television aesthetic pervasive in Europe. His projects often take the form of lectures, courses, newsletters, and walks that both engage with and parody pedagogical and administrative norms.