In The Poem About Love

In The Poem About Love You Don’t Write The Word Love, a project that consists of an exhibition, a film series, and an accompanying book, brings together works by several generations of artists and filmmakers whose practices engage- in tacit and explicit ways- the overwhelming media culture in which we live. Displacement is a seam that emerges and retreats through more than 30 works: a selection of film and video installations, sculptures, paintings, drawings, collage, and photographs. These works demonstrate a fundamental incompleteness, deferring any sense of a true image, reinforcing the confused neurotic state between entities, and challenging the status of the “visual.”

At the time of the 1991 Gulf War, Serge Daney, one of the greatest French film critics, offered a straightforward distinction between the “image,” and the “visual.” His theory contrasted the undifferentiated visual flux of the communication loop with the discrete, specific image that testifies to something off-screen, to an “other.” Daney described the visual as that which decorates, “the optical verification of a purely technical function,” like a cliché or a closed-circuit feed. It is, he continued, “something like pornographic spectacle, which is just the ecstatic confirmation that the organs still function, nothing else.” The image, on the other hand is that which still holds out against an experience of vision. Though it has an irreducible core, the image is nevertheless “always more and less than itself.”

What sort of resistance or touching memory is possible? asks Daney. How can contemporary art fracture the dominant model of the visual and its thoughtless circulation? What kind of audience can it address or mobilize? What form of community can it suggest? In The Poem About Love You Don’t Write The Word Love faces these questions with works that articulate challenges to the assumed shape of the visual, destabilizing its authority, and complicating the increasingly urgent tensions between the visual and the image. As the title suggests, the works engage various strategies that fabricate distances, demonstrating a profound irreconcilability and a deliberate resistance to any form of synthesis. They underscore the need to break through the static barrage of a media-saturated world, to disrupt the visual, and produce the movement of thought.

The film series accompanying the exhibition will be held at Anthology Film Archives in January 2007. For showtimes, please visit www.artistsspace.org or www.anthologyfilmarchives.org

ARCHITECTURE & DESIGN PROJECT SERIES: UniBodies

PATTERNS / Marcelo Spina with Kreysler & Associates / Makai Smith:

PATTERNS: Marcelo Spina and Georgina Huljich. Project Architect: Seyavash Zohoori. Project Designers: Marcus Friesl and Jooyoung Chun. Assistants: James Vincent, Noriaki Hanaoka, Lionel Lambourn and Duly Lee. Kreysler & Associates: Bill Kreysler and Makai Smith. Scott Van Note, Joshua Zabel, Jesus Ambriz-Villasenor, Miguel Ambriz-Villasenor and Jesus Flores.

UniBodies is a collaboration between architect Marcelo Spina, principal of Los Angeles-based PATTERNS, and Makai Smith from the fabrication studio Kreysler & Associates. UniBodies is driven by PATTERNS’ ongoing design research on shell structures and their impact in architectural form and tectonics, as well as the expertise of K&A in composites and digital fabrication. The exhibition consists of a family of composite objects that inventively challenge the implicit distinctions between skeleton and skin, modular and monolithic, and smooth and porous.

Conceptually, the title UniBodies implies a uniquely integrated process of fabrication, production and assembly that streamlines construction while also allowing for advanced technological, formal and material innovation. By means of multiple prototypes, UniBodies investigates the potentialof composite shells in the production of small and intensive proto architectures that inventively challenge assumed notions of hierarchy and separation between structure and skin.

Materially, UniBodies explores the plasticity of composites and unitized construction systems. Composites or FRP [Fibber Reinforced Polymers] can synthetically subsume systems: melding, fusing and embedding discrete components within single body-shells. Furthermore, composites imply an amalgamation of time and procedure. Based on a unique method of heterogeneously assembling surfaces, every piece is made from a variable combination of fiber cloth, resin matrix, and flexible core materials. UniBodies exploits the versatility of composites to produce artificial materialities and intensive gradients. Variable degrees of translucency, viscosity and surface profile—from coarse and uneven to smooth and fair—are molded and explored through pigmentation and filling of the resin.

Lastly, UniBodies is as much about the cohesive material sensation and intimacy within physical bodies as it is about the induced resonances between those bodies and the Body.

PATTERNS, a design research architectural practice based in Los Angeles, is known for its inventive approach to architecture that fuses advanced digital techniques with an extended material understanding of form and tectonics. Kreysler & Associates / Makai Smith, Assoc. AIA is a composites fabrication facility located near Napa, CA that blends high-tech and traditional form-making techniques to produce custom products for architecture and fine art.

Participating artists: Ayreen Anastas, Marcel Broodthaers, François Bucher, Matthew Buckingham, Bruce Conner, Bernadette Corporation, Jeremy Deller, Gardar Eide Einarsson, Harun Farocki and Andrei Ujica, Jean-Luc Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville, Sharon Hayes, Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson, Emily Jacir, Gareth James, Alexander Kluge, Phillip Lai, David Lamelas, Simon Martin, John Menick, Avi Mograbi, Lucas Ospina, Giulio Paolini, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Mai-Thu Perret, Walid Raad, Jose Alejandro Restrepo, Marc Robinson, Keith Sanborn, Allan Sekula, John Smith, Sue Tompkins, and Andy Warhol.

Curated by Tanya Leighton

An illustrated catalogue will be published for the exhibition

In The Poem About Love You Don’t Write The Word Love
Kurator: Tanya Leighton

mit Ayreen Anastas, Marcel Broodthaers, Francois Bucher, Matthew Buckingham, Bruce Conner, Bernadette Corporation, Jeremy Deller, Gardar Eide Einarsson, Harun Farocki / Andrei Ujica, Jean-Luc Godard / Anne-Marie Mieville, Sharon Hayes, Nancy Holt / Robert Smithson, Emily Jacir, Gareth James, Alexander Kluge, Phillip Lai, David Lamelas, Simon Martin, John Menick, Avi Mograbi, Lucas Ospina, Giulio Paolini, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Mai-Thu Perret, Walid Ra´ad, Jose Alejandro Restrepo, Marc Robinson, Keith Sanborn, Allan Sekula, John Smith, Sue Tompkins, Andy Warhol