martin boyce-interior/exterior

In a series of new works developed specifically for presentation in Venice, Martin Boyce has devised a lyrical installation for seven inter-connected rooms of the second floor of the 15th-century Palazzo Pisani (S. Marina).
The artist transforms the fading grandeur of this palace with suspended, geometric chandeliers, sculptural autumn leaves, stepping stones, brass letters, tables and benches – all altered from the everyday into an atmospheric, poetic landscape. Boyce has set out to ‘delve into the city’s interior landscape’ and with this exhibition he conflates the internal and external and echoes the labyrinthine nature of Venice, creating a heightened sense of displacement and abandonment.Martin Boyce (born 1967) lives and works in Glasgow. He is one of Scotland’s most prominent artists and is well known for his sculptural installations that recall conventional public spaces – the playground, pedestrian subway, discarded or abandoned sites – to form a cohesive and immersive environment, one that the writer Will Bradley calls, “both a proposition about social space and a dreamscape in itself”. Individual works comprising of sculptural forms recall familiar public furniture: benches, bins, signage and lighting. Drawing on the iconography and subsequent production of modernist design, these objects take on an alternative life by being displaced from their original context and purpose.

john cage: chess pieces

Chess Pieces, was only rediscovered and played for the first time in 2005.

Cage had been invited to participate in a chess-themed exhibit at the Julian Levy Gallery organized by Max Ernst and Marcel Duchamp, and he created a chessboard-sized painting with fragments of musical scores in each of the squares. Each square held about twelve measures in three rows. The painting went into a private collection where it remains, almost completely invisible to the outside Cageian world until 2005, when the Noguchi Museum recreated the 1944 exhibit, "The Imagery of Chess." [Noguchi had contributed a chess set to the show, as did artists such as Man Ray and Alexander Calder.]

Anyway, Cage pianist Margaret Leng Tan was commissioned to transcribe and perform the score in the painting, which premiered alongside the 2005 exhibit. The DVD of the Chess Pieces performance includes several other Cage sonatas and some short-sounding documentaries, including one about the history of the work. Not sure what that means.

As a painting, the collaged, juxtaposed chaos of the notes contrasts with the order of the grid. It kind of reminds me of the cut-up technique William Burroughs and the Beats' applied to books and printed texts a few years later. [The history of cut-up mentions an interesting, even earlier reference: Dada pioneer Tristan Tzara, who was expelled from Breton's Surrealist movement when he tried to create poetry by pulling words out of a hat.]

As a musical composition, Chess Pieces is nice, old-school Cage, abstract and occasionally abrupt, but with a still-traditional piano feel. Since the piece's randomness comes from its structure--the distribution of the notational fragments across the grid--and not from the performer's own decisions, it somehow has a "composed" feeling to it. So though it's new to audiences today, it's also classic, early Cage.

fred sandback: space and volume

Sandback’s sculptures outline planes and volumes in space. Though he employed metal wire and elastic cord early in his career, the artist soon dispensed with mass and weight by using acrylic yarn to create works that address their physical surroundings, the “pedestrian space,” as Sandback called it, of everyday life. By stretching lengths of yarn horizontally, vertically, or diagonally at different scales and in varied configurations, the artist developed a singular body of work that elaborated on the phenomenological experience of space and volume with unwavering consistency and ingenuity.

toby paterson

Toby Paterson makes paintings, reliefs and constructions which explore the relationship between abstraction and reality. He has a keen interest in post-war modernist architecture which he deconstructs both materially and politically, developing a practice in which some works are almost understandable as architecture, while others are expressions of purely abstract form.

martin boyce- developing a motif

Martin Boyce presents a suspended sculpture composed of standard fluorescent light fixtures in the form of a spider web. Measuring approximately forty by fifty feet, the piece will fill the entirety of SculptureCenter's ceiling space and hang twenty feet above the ground. Boyce has employed the web as a motif for several years, a form that references the urban grid and simultaneously suggests organic order, both possessing the ability to expand infinitely. The sculpture will diverge from an earlier version of the piece in that the web will be irregular, reflecting a broken grid.