Greater New York 2005, jointly organized by P.S.1 and The Museum of Modern Art, New York went on view March 13, 2005, showcasing 150 artists who have emerged since 2000. Their work explores this specific time period, during which New York City has changed dramatically; shows vitality, energy, and exciting promise; and anticipates new artistic directions. The exhibition includes artists from New York's five boroughs, as well as nearby towns in New Jersey, and builds from the spirit of its first incarnation, Greater New York, which opened at P.S.1 in 2000, shortly after the two institutions became affiliated. This accompanying catalogue documents trends, process, and media explored by the artists in the exhibition. Each artist featured in the exhibition receives a two-page spread that includes images, text, and biographical information. Among the 160 participating artists included are Dana Schutz, Taylor McKinens, Jules de Balincourt, Jen DeNike, Steve Mumford, Peter Rostovsky, Saya Woolfalk, Wangechi Mutu, Wade Guyton, Atlas Group/Walid Raad, Christian Jankowski and many more.

Greater New York 2005

Arts & Photography

Collections, Catalogs & Exhibitions

P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center

John Wesley: Paintings: 1961-2000

Accompanying a retrospective at P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center in New York, this new monograph documents the work of painter John Wesley, covering his entire career from 1961 until today. Wesley is known for his consistency of palette--baby blues and cotton pinks--his use of painted "frames" within his pictures, his early emblem paintings, his cartoon Bumstead works--and ultimately for his representations of an inner erotic voyage where the viewer is both voyager and voyeur. Initially considered in alignment with pop artists of the early 60s, Wesley consistently produced works of such a subtle and subversive nature as to put him in a category of his own. He used the early tools of advertising production--like tracing paper and stock photography--and was the subject of a wide range of influences, from Surrealism to Art Nouveau, from ancient Greek poetry to Matisse. The result is an oeuvre that has challenged and rewarded viewers for forty years.

Christov-Bakargiev, Carolyn

O'Doherty, Brian

History & Criticism

Essays by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, Alanna Heiss, Brian O'Doherty.

Wesley, John

Individual Artists

Janet Cardiff: A Survey of Works, with George Bures Miller

Shifting between fact and fiction, between the experience of the real and our projections, fantasies, and desires, Janet Cardiff's audio-video and multimedia installations explore the complexity and vertiginous nature of subjectivity in a highly technological world. They are interactive pieces where visitors are asked to touch, listen, smell, and often move through an environment shaped both by our perceptions and by the artist's alteration of them. With references to film noir, science fiction, cyber-punk and various other filmic genres, her works, often created in collaboration with husband George Bures Miller, address the constant need to negotiate between presence and loss of self, memory and experience, sensation and imagination.

Lowry, Glenn

Brisebois, Marcel

Miller, George Bures

Beecroft, Vanessa

Cardiff, Janet

Essay by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev. Foreword by Alanna Heiss, Glenn Lowry and Marcel Brisebois.

Living in a cramped space where Beverly Hills and Calcutta meet every day, the artists gathered here explore the tension between wealth and poverty, among progress, stagnation, and improvisation, and between the violence and civility that animates the vibrant center that is Mexico City. Compounding the complexity of urban living, high rates of kidnapping, murder and pollution become a daily threat. For the rich, the body becomes an object to be cared for, protected, even exchanged for ransom, while, for an underclass of day laborers, homeless people, and prostitutes, survival depends on participation in physically exploitative situations that place an exact commercial value on the body. Alluding to recent art historical movements such as body art, process art, and arte povera, these artists use everyday objects and situations to form a complex dialogue about Mexico City and its relationship with the first world, focusing on the influence of the global economy on aesthetic values and daily life. Daniela Rossell's series of photographs, Ricas y Famosas, captures the endangered species of the rich and famous in their ornate and overprotective environments, and Francis Als documents people pushing and pulling their wares to and from the marketplace, leveraging their body weight against the commercial value they are physically dragging along.

Mexico City: An Exhibition About the Exchange Rates of Bodies and Values (P.S.1 CONTEMPOR)

"Today, video is a familiar tool at the artist's disposal. But to those who experimented with the technology in the 1960s and 70s--when affordable equipment became commercially available--the capabilities inherent in the medium were unknown. Vito Acconci, Joan Jonas, and Bruce Nauman, among other American pioneers, used videotape to document and extend their performance work. Acconci, for one, produced conceptual, performance-based video work in the 70s that consisted of ruthless interrogations of the artist and viewer, as though defining the video medium were a matter of universal urgency. Video Acts provides a historical overview of video art created for display on a single monitor, with more than 100 pieces, dating from the mid-60s through 2000, including numerous landmarks in the development of this young medium by Marina Abramovic, Gilbert & George, Acconci, Jonas, and Nauman, as well as more recent work by Tony Oursler, Darren Almond, Pipilotti Rist, and others redefining the genre."

Video Acts

LONDON, BARBARA

Eamon, Christopher

During the last five years of his life, Chen Zhen expended his energies to create a body of work that poetically articulated his knowledge of traditional Chinese culture and Western avant-garde art. Born in Shanghai in 1955, Chen grew up during the tumultuous years of the Cultural Revolution. When China transitioned out of that era, he became interested in combining traditional Chinese philosophy (forbidden under Maoist rule) and Western practices as an alternative to the government's official cultural ideology. The resulting body of work held as a central theme the creation of harmony through difference, taking the human body, illness and medicine as metaphors, mixing cross-cultural social dynamics before multiculturalism and globalization had ever been articulated. Exploring the intricate and often paradoxical relationship between the material and the spiritual, the community and the individual, interior and exterior, Chen used sound and everyday materials such as candles, beds, chairs, and even chamber pots, linking the physical world to the spiritual, ritualistic one. The result was an aesthetic immersed in the traditional past but aligned with the present. This catalogue accompanies an exhibition held at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center in tribute to the artist, who died from a rare medical condition known as autoimmune hemolytic anemia in 2000, in Paris, where he had emigrated as an art student in the mid-80s.

Chen Zhen: A Tribute

ZHEN, CHEN

Throughout history, the excitements, surprises and discoveries of travel have inspired many. Great travelers, of course, are often great ambassadors of knowledge and ideas, but while the exchanges between disparate cultures have enchanted--and sometimes puzzled--both the visitors and the visited, they have also historically been the cause of conflict and strife. Christopher Columbus's fourth long voyage from Spain to America has been chosen as a metaphor for P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center's exhibition The Real Royal Trip. The “artist-travelers” featured in this historic exhibition reveal through their work a potent creative energy and illuminate the flow of new ideas, images, and approaches emerging from Spain's unique contemporary cultural climate. Breaking down barriers established by nations, the exhibition reaches across the Atlantic Ocean to include work by artists from Cuba and Puerto Rico, pursuing the pioneering voices of contemporary Latin America. (The inclusion of Ernesto Neto ensures that the great South American dream is also represented.) With the language of Spain--and not its national borders--as a common currency, this international panorama of art-making proposes a new kind of Spanish identity, one that is intricately linked to U.S. and Latin American culture.

The Real Royal Trip/El Real Viaje Real

Szeemann, Harald

History

Robert Bergman: Selected Portraits

With just a handheld 35 mm camera and natural lighting, Robert Bergman explores his subjects with an evident determination to record a connection, even at the expense of surroundings, which Bergman tends to carefully forfeit as a compositional element. The series documented in this catalogue, produced for Bergman's exhibition at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, charts the evolving character of Americans at the turn of the millennium. Of this series, Toni Morrison has written: "Occasionally there arises an event or a moment that one knows immediately will forever mark a place in the history of artistic endeavor. Robert Bergman's portraits represent such a moment, such an event. In all its burnished majesty his gallery refuses us unearned solace and one by one by one each photograph unveils us, asserting a beauty, a kind of rapture, that is as close as can be to a master template of the singularity, the community, the unextinguishable sacredness of the human race."

Strauss, David

Photography & Video

See the best price to sell, buy or rent books by the P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center publisher. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center

See the best price to sell, buy or rent books by the P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center publisher. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Greater New York 2005

John Wesley: Paintings: 1961-2000

John Wesley: Paintings: 1961-2000

Janet Cardiff: A Survey of Works, with George Bures Miller

Janet Cardiff: A Survey of Works, with George Bures Miller

Mexico City: An Exhibition About the Exchange Rates of Bodies and Values (P.S.1 CONTEMPOR)

Video Acts

Chen Zhen: A Tribute

The Real Royal Trip/El Real Viaje Real

Robert Bergman: Selected Portraits