| P.S.1 Contemporary
Art Center presents Hard Light, a group exhibition featuring
works by internationally renowned artists Doug Aitken, Fischli/Weiss,
Carsten Höller, Chris Marker, Bruce Nauman, Ugo Rondinone,
Ed Ruscha, and Lawrence Weiner.
The co-curatorial effort of P.S.1 Chief Curator Klaus Biesenbach
and artist Doug Aitken, Hard Light brings together works
by nine artists who engage in a range of processes of narrative
construction. Among other similarities, the works in this
exhibition all explore particular qualities of light, or
“hard light” (a film/photography term used to
describe a lighting situation that casts a sharp, clearly
defined shadow), that contribute to the development of fragmented,
or broken, “ambient” narratives.
The exhibition will include Doug Aitken’s recent monumental
video installation Interiors (2002), large-scale photographs
from Fischli/Weiss’ Airport series (1988-1998); Atomium
Phi (2004), a light-based sculpture by Carsten Höller,
preparatory materials (storyboards, photographs, notes and
drawings) for Chris Marker’s legendary 1962 film La
Jetée, Bruce Nauman’s celebrated Green Light
Corridor (1970), a large photography and sound installation,
Sleep (1999), by Ugo Rondinone, as well as preparatory materials
for Ed Ruscha and Lawrence Weiner’s 1978 book, Hard
Light.
Interiors consists of eleven fabric screens that form an
enclosed viewing space, three of which receive shifting
video projections. The translucency of the remaining panels
permits the audience to view alternating imagery from both
inside and outside the enclosure. The installation focuses
on four distinct characters/scenarios: a Tokyo auctioneer,
a young man (Andre 3000 from the music group Outkast) navigating
desolate urban streets, a helicopter factory worker who
doubles as a tap dancer, and a young woman playing handball.
Each individual scenario has a unique soundtrack. Aitken’s
fusion of sound and imagery successfully unifies these seemingly
disparate story lines.
Large-scale Airport photographs (48 7/8” x 73”
each) by longtime collaborators Peter Fischli (b. 1952,
Zürich, Switzerland) and David Weiss (b. 1946, Zürich,
Switzerland) address our notions of movement and stasis,
cinematically representing what seems to be a single, contained
environment, but what is, in fact, a number of different
spaces, at different times, in vastly different locales.
Carsten Höller’s (b. 1961, Brussels, Belgium)
Atomium Phi (2004), a sculpture modified especially for
P.S.1’s exhibition, is based on a phenomenon discovered
in 1912 by the Gestalt psychologist Max Wertheimer, in which
the observer “sees” an imaginary ball jumping
in between two dots projected next to each other in rapid
sequence. Exploring ideas of reconstructed perception, Atomium
Phi suggests that linear time is not as “real”
as we believe it to be, and that our senses, by their nature,
create the rearranged time frame sequence we inhabit.
Green Light Corridor (1970), one of Bruce Nauman’s
(b. 1941, Fort Wayne, Indiana) legendary “light pieces”
may be seen as a precursor to this line of thought. As a
viewer moves through the narrow, open-ended corridor, illuminated
by green fluorescent lights from above, the eyes become
overwhelmed by its particular shade of green. A magenta
afterimage appears when one exits the corridor, thus communicating
a narrative progression via shifts in light and color and
physical positioning.
Chris Marker (b. 1921, Neuilly-sur-Seine, France), who has
often been labeled a cinematic essayist and poet, produced
the seminal avant-garde film La Jeteé in 1962. On
view at P.S.1 will be high-resolution digital reproductions
of every page of the notebook in which Marker storyboarded
and sketched the path his film would take. These pages serve
as a window into the construction of one of the most famous
and exploratory ambient narratives in cinema.
Sleep (1999), a large photography and sound installation
by Ugo Rondinone (b. 1963, Brunnen, Switzerland), uses the
technique of the storyboard and couples it with an audio
component, creating a cinematic narrative without employing
a moving image. Rondinone will personally install this piece
at the museum, re-plotting the layout of the photographs
so that they work specifically with the gallery space to
tell a nonlinear story extending in multiple directions.
Also on view will be photographs, a letter, a notebook and
other ephemera related to the production of Ed Ruscha’s
(b. 1937, Omaha, Nebraska) and Lawrence Weiner’s (b.
1942, Bronx, New York) 1978 collaboration Hard Light, a
book of photographs and minimal text separated into chapters
in the manner of a short novella. Hard Light depicts the
daily lives of two young women in Los Angeles as they engage
in activities at once banal and strangely incomprehensible.
It is impossible to pull a single narrative thread from
the imagery, and the reader is left to draw his or her own
conclusions from hard-lit snapshots of various mysterious
sequences of events.
This exhibition is co-curated by P.S.1 Chief Curator Klaus
Biesenbach and Doug Aitken.
This exhibition is made possible by James Family Foundation,
Donald B. Marron, and Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zürich.
Doug Aitken’s Interiors was commissioned and organized
by the Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia. The project
was supported by a grant from the Philadelphia Exhibitions
Initiative, a program funded by The Pew Charitable Trusts,
and administered by The University of the Arts, Philadelphia.
Major support was also provided by The Andy Warhol Foundation
for the Visual Arts. The National Endowment for the Arts
provided additional funding for Aitken’s residency
at The Fabric Workshop and Museum.
For more information, please
contact Rachael Dorsey, P.S.1 Press Office, at press@ps1.org
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