November 14 – December 20, 1991
Beaver College Art Gallery
The Beaver College Art Gallery is pleased to present “Residue Politics,” a thematic exhibition with artists Nayland Blake, Jennifer Bolande, Greg Colson, David Hammons, Mike Kelley, Christian Marclay, Karen Kilimnik and Christy Rupp, on view from November 14 through December 20.
There will be a public lecture by Germano Celant, curator for contemporary art, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York City, on Thursday, November 21, 6:00 PM in Stiteler Auditorium, followed by a reception in the art gallery. Both events are free and open to the public.
“Residue Politics” focuses on a new generation of American assemblage artists, indebted to Arte Povera, process art and conceptualism. Each of these eight artists restructures found and/or left over, discarded or otherwise marginal materials for both aesthetic power and a larger connection to and reflection of the social order, touching on a continuum of socio-political themes. For example, they comment upon the domestication of political corruption (Blake); caricature the sentimentalization of childhood (Kelley); configure tableaux torn from the American landscape of social and domestic violence (Kilimnik); memorialize the relics of popular culture as they examine their underlying sexual and economic ideologies (Marclay); reconstruct the complex layering of black culture and identity (Hammons); investigate our troubled relationship with nature (Rupp); and crate metaphors for the dislocated experience of late 20th Century culture (Bolande, Colson). Marclay and Kilimnik each created new installations especially for this exhibition.
“’Residue Politics’ attempts to direct attention to the substantive issues underlying a stylistic phenomenon,” notes Gallery Director Paula Marincola. “In drawing our attention to that which has been overlooked and often suppressed, the works in this show speak in a variety of compelling voices to a realm of shared information and experience.”
Of the artists in the exhibition, Bolande, Hammons, Marclay and Rupp live in New York City. Blake lives in San Francisco, and Kelley and Colson live in Los Angeles. Kilimnik lives in Philadelphia. Blake, Kelley and Marclay were included in the 1991 Whitney Biennial.
Celant, who is a contributing editor at “Artforum” and “Interview” magazines in addition to his duties at the Guggenheim Museum, will lecture Thursday, November 21, 6:00 PM in Stiteler Auditorium on the affinities between European Arte Povera and its “Americanized” version as manifested in the “Residue Politics” exhibition.
Celant is the critic and curator most loosely associated with the Arte Povera movement in Europe and is well known for his critical writing as well as for severa, major museum exhibitions that he has organized for institutions in the U.S. and abroad. He has written books on Joseph Beuys, Piero Manzoni, Jannis Kounellis and Michelangelo Pistoletto, among others. He is currently working on several shows, including a European retrospective to open at the Guggenheim Museum in 1992.
A catalogue will be forthcoming documenting the exhibition with an essay by Celant and an introduction by Beaver College Art Gallery Director Paula Marincola. The catalogue and exhibition both have been funded by the National Endowment for the Arts in Washington D.C., the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, the Dietrich Foundation, the Friends of Beaver College Art Gallery and the Beaver College Department of Fine Arts.
