John Cage, 1912 – 1992
As 2012 marks the centennial of John Cage’s birth, this exhibition commemorates the widespread effect of the artist’s six decades of assiduous, and relentless inventive creation on subsequent generations of artists. Read more...
William Anastasi
William Anastasi’s Sink involves a simple action that turns into a meditation. A humble thick steel slab occupies the floor; the repetitive (daily) ritual of watering this slab ends up producing a rich, variagated patina. Read more...
Soledad Arias
Soledad Arias works in a variety of media including neon, prints, installations, and interventions. She is interested in exploring human relationships towards different modes of communication. Read more...
Céleste Boursier-Mougenot
French composer and artist Céleste Boursier-Mougenot creates situations where sonic events take visual form or, conversely, where visual information is expressed acoustically—a highly Cagean conundrum. In his sound environments, Boursier-Mougenot extracts the musical potential of everyday objects by creating systems and rules for musical situations to generate and sustain themselves. Read more...
Waltercio Caldas
Waltercio Caldas does not wish to distance himself from art historical icons. Quite the contrary. He willfully and playfully maintains an active dialogue with classical and modern works, namely by Marcel Duchamp, Giorgio Morandi, and Man Ray, among others. Read more...
José Damasceno
A primary theme of Damasceno’s work is the reification of space: his manipulation of negative space through the careful arrangement and accumulation of objects makes palpable that which is usually unseen and taken for granted as empty. Read more...
Hanne Darboven
German artist Hanne Darboven moved to New York in 1966, where she soon met artist Sol LeWitt and critic Lucy Lippard among many others. New York was then the cradle of Minimalism and Conceptual art. Read more...
Matthew Deleget
Cage’s use of systems and chance operations was a means by which he could divest his work of self-expression, preferring to let sounds be themselves, and ever fearful to have them bear the burden of carrying some meaning. Cage let go of the romantic notion of the artist’s hand: aesthetic decisions should have nothing to do with the artist. Read more...
Liz Deschenes
Deschenes exposed photosensitive paper outside after dusk and brought the sheets indoors before sunrise. Read more...
Felipe Dulzaides
Working in a variety of mediums and contexts, Felipe Dulzaides explores shifting perceptions of the natural world. Projects include installations such as an inflatable heart, in which children can jump (What is essential is invisible to the eyes, 2006), to quickly constructed scaffolding whose function is to keep a ball from falling to the floor (Structure that keeps the ball off the ground, 2002). Read more...
León Ferrari
Incandescent lines define the work of León Ferrari, first appearing in his complex wire sculptures of the 1960s, then, in the same period, emerging in words, within a language meant to challenge violence and repression. In The Art of Meaning (1968), he criticizes avant-garde art that is restricted to formal innovation. Read more...
Robert Filliou
A French member of the international Fluxus movement in the 1960s, Robert Filliou was in direct contact with John Cage. This can be seen in his work predominantly through an ongoing exploration of the interplay between silence and music, as in Telepathic Music No. 5. Read more...
Yukio Fujimoto
Yukio Fujimoto’s combinations of sound installation, and found objects challenge traditional Japanese art practice. Often described as a sound artist, Fujimoto, in fact, is more interested in activating all senses by creating interactions that encourage viewers to see, feel, hear, and touch the art object.
The artist describes these interactive provocations as “philosophical toys.” Read more...
Nicolás Guagnini & Gareth James
In 2006 Nicolás Guagnini, and his colleague, Gareth James, made a proposal to the Andrew Roth gallery to take a full-page ad in the summer issue of the art world’s Holy Grail, Artforum. The gallery agreed and Guagnini and James then invited seven artists: Alejandro Cesarco, Rodney Graham, Jutta Koether, Guillermo Kuitca, Seth Price, Nancy Spero, and Lawrence Weiner to create seven original works within this format. Read more...
Lynne Harlow
Lynne Harlow’s work questions the limits of art, both in terms of the notion of the traditional art object and the viewer’s relation to it. Pushing the work almost to the point of dissolution, her work requires the participation of the viewer, even if only as witness, in order to operate—in order to rescue its very existence. Read more...
Douglas Huebler
Variable Piece #70 is one of many conceptual photographic works and documentations by Douglas Huebler, a major figure in Conceptual Art in the late 1960s. A bit older than other Conceptual artists, such as Lawrence Weiner, Jan Dibbets, and Richard Long, Huebler has held a critical role within the development of Conceptualism, namely by being a proponent of dissolving or “dematerializing” the art object—which soon became a shibboleth of Conceptualism. Read more...
David Lamelas
David Lamelas helps us reconsider the forms and meanings applied to art in the ‘60s and ‘70s. His interest in media, especially cinema, is related to his greater concern with the nature of information and the means of conveying that information. Read more...
Reiner Leist
Beginning in 1995, as a romantic gesture to a long-distance lover, Reiner Leist started taking a photograph from the same window of his midtown loft almost every day. The frame directs the viewer’s gaze down Eighth Avenue from the twenty-sixth floor of the artist’s building. Read more...
Jorge Macchi
Chance, employed as a mechanism for creative production, offers the possibility of random yet
often fortuitous moments that result in shifting conventional modes of understanding and the creation of new meaning. Resorting to chance operations in his compositional process allowed John Cage to enter the realm of quotidian and prosaic circumstances. Read more...
Christian Marclay
In Indian Point Road, a camera was set on a tripod by the artist along a quiet country road in Maine. Throughout the video, a single frame captures, unedited, the indeterminate, and indeterminable flow of events that occur alongside the route. Read more...
Rivane Neuenschwander
While she was living in London, Brazilian artist Rivane Neuenschwander swept up all the debris in her home onto large square adhesive sheets. The results were two cubicles entirely tiled, from the walls to the floor, with the residue of daily life. Read more...
Kaz Oshiro
Everyday objects—trash dumpsters, guitar amps, washing machines—are the source of Kaz Oshiro’s imagery. Through an artistic tour de force that interweaves painting and sculpture, the artist creates deceivingly close representations of such objects. Read more...
Edgardo Rudnitzky
Edgardo Rudnitzky is a sound artist, composer, and percussionist, whose practice incorporates sound and visual art in theatrical settings, dance, and films. Rudnitzky’s works explore the nature of sound in its physical presence. Read more...
Fred Sandback
Fred Sandback’s breakthrough came in 1967 when, while still in graduate school, he outlined a twenty-foot-long 2 x 4 with string and wire, removing the board so that only the outline remained. This was the beginning of a long-held artistic process and exploration into the representation of presence versus absence. Read more...
Frank Scheffer
Frank Scheffer is a Dutch documentarian who focuses primarily on music, including subjects such as the 1995 Mahler Festival in Amsterdam and the musician Frank Zappa. Scheffer has collaborated with and documented John Cage in Chessfilmnoise (1988) and Time is Music (1988). Read more...
Ushio Shinohara
In 1952, Ushio Shinohara attended the Tokyo University of the Arts to study painting. He disliked the strict curriculum, however, and ultimately decided not to graduate. Instead, he helped found the prolific Neo-Dada Movement in Tokyo, which was instrumental in transforming traditional art practices by creating work that did not conform to traditional aesthetics. Read more...
Linda Stillman
The conceptual basis of Stillman’s oeuvre, ranging from these Daily Paintings to photographs of found gloves to a project recording the progression of a vegetable garden over the course of a few months, finds its origins in the paradoxical work of John Cage. Read more...
Daniel Wurtzel
Twin crimson fabrics dance, captured inside currents of air produced by a chorus of twelve household fans encircling them. Daniel Wurtzel’s Pas de Deux elicits uncanny elegance in animating the inanimate. Read more...
Notations: The Cage Effect Today
Notations: The Cage Effect Today is on view at the Hunter College Times Square Gallery, 450 West 41st Street, from February 17 through April 21, 2012. This exhibition was organized to coincide with the centennial of John Cage’s birth.
Curated by Joachim Pissarro, together with Bibi Calderaro, Julio Grinblatt, and Michelle Yun
Hunter College is deeply grateful to the following donors, whose generous support has made this exhibition possible: Peter M. Brant, The Brant Foundation, Inc.; Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros; The Foundation To-Life; Agnes Gund; The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation; The Ruth Stanton Foundation; and YoungArts, the core program of the National Foundation for Advancement in the Arts.
The Hunter College Art Galleries
The Bertha and Karl Leubsdorf Art Gallery
68th Street and Lexington Avenue, SW corner
New York, NY 10065
Hunter College/Times Square Gallery
450 West 41st Street (between Dyer and 10th)
New York, NY 10036
Tel: 212-772-4991
Fax: 212-772-4554
http://www.hunter.cuny.edu/art/galleries
