Elements

Dove Bradshaw

Stalke Galleri, Vesterbrogade 

06-01-01 -to 17.02.01

Three simultaneously exhibitions in Denmark, Nikolaj Contemporary art and Museum of Modern Art in Roskilde with:

Anastasi-Bradshaw-Cage

DOVE BRADSHAW
Stalke Galleri

Dove Bradshaw, an American artist in the gallery, is widely known as a pioneer of indeterminacy in sculpture, painting, performance, and film. Her most recent exhibition of new work titled Elements will be at the Stalke Gallery opening January 6th, 2001, from 12–2:30 PM. It is her fourth exhibition with the gallery since her first inclusion in a show in 1988. Concurrent with this, The Museum of Contemporary Art in Roskilde is presenting an exhibition titled Anastasi Bradshaw Cage, opening 5–7 PM, January 5th, and closing March 11, 2001. In cooperation with these two exhibitions, The Nikolaj Museum will have a retrospective of the work of William Anastasi from January 6 – March 11, 2001, opening from 3–5 PM, January 6th.

At Stalke Gallery, in one room, Bradshaw will show three sculptures from an alternate version of Negative Ions (1996). In each, water from a glass separatory funnel continuously flows at a calibrated rate onto a mound of salt. Concurrent with this exhibition, Waterstones (1996), in which water drops on stone, will show at Stark Gallery in New York opening February 8th – March 8, 2001.

In another room, Self Interest, a work from 1999, receives its first public showing. It consists of the twelve major and six trace elements that make up the human body. Each element is isolated in identified glass flasks in its proper proportion.

In a third room is a new series of shaped canvases titled White Enough. Each painting is a triangle within a triangle. The outlined smaller area is distinguished by its individual white pigment. (For Roskilde, a chance-determined score for rotating the related painting they are to show will guide the art handlers for the exhibition's duration.) Notation VII(2000) is an existing outdoor sculpture which will also be shown in this room. A truncated triangular brass column, having "bled" in the weather, stains the limestone cube that supports it. In the east end of this room, Untitled (2000), a three-meter brass strip is shown horizontally on the wall. Below it, Material/Immaterial (2000), another outdoor sculpture, combines a piece of facecalxstein with a piece of kildecalx. (Six works from this series will also be shown at Roskilde.)

In yet another room, two related pieces made of copper are each embedded in the wall: Passion (1993), a version of which was shown in Stalke's 10th Anniversary Exhibition, and Infringement, also conceived in 1993, but not yet shown. Passion consists of a copper bar embedded vertically in the wall at eye level; Infringement consists of a copper bar the same size embedded vertically in the wall touching the floor. Each is then treated with an ammonium chloride and copper sulfate solution. The stain from Passion marks the wall; Infringement's stain marks the floor.

In the last room, a sculpture titled Nothing (2000) is presented. This is a 24-carat gold casting of the two halves of a goose-egg shell. The series began in 1969 with a bronze cast of the two halves of a hen's egg shell. (Shown at Roskilde is a silver cast of hen's egg shell also from that year.) The Art Institute of Chicago exhibited Nothing IV (a 1989 gold casting from their permanent collection) in a room devoted to the 1980's clearly commenting on the market excesses of that decade.

Review:

Art Without Intentions

The Museum of Contemporary Art paints a picture of the connections between the three American conceptual artists John Cage, William Anastasi, and Dove Bradshaw.

Conceptual Art

What happens when one has not predetermined the intentions behind the works one creates as an artist? And how does one deal with the idea of intentionlessness?

It sounds paradoxical and unmanageable: But intentionless actions – according to the American composer and artist John Cage – open up far greater possibilities, because one’s mental awareness is not limited by pre-established solutions.

If an artist wishes to surprise themselves or their audience, they must dare to abandon the techniques, methods, and strategies they have learned to master. When traditional art, e.g., painting on canvas, must be viewed with open eyes and a free mind, one must also abandon traditional rules – as Cage’s friend, William Anastasi, does. One must dare to look blindly ahead to preserve the possibility of creating the unexpected. (Editor’s note: The progressiveness of the age only acknowledges the unexpected when it results in new methods or surfaces.)

With other words: The unconventional and unpredictable have a special potential in art as an alternative method. But the artist must also be disciplined and apply a kind of inverted logic.

This is why an exclusive exhibition in Roskilde. Its subject is not popular, and its works are demanding, but it is rich and respectfully communicated. The exhibition shapes itself as a living meeting between three artists, who knew each other and worked together in close dialogue. One of them, John Cage, died a few years ago, and his necrology is still rewritten, for his significance can hardly be overstated. Perhaps he is, as the composer Karl Aage Rasmussen writes in his excellent introduction in the catalog, the most influential artist of our time, “because his thoughts and ideas radiated in all directions, to visual art, poetry, ‘performing arts,’ aesthetics, and philosophy.”

Cage's ideas radiated, at least to Anastasi, and gave impetus to his art. He taught his younger American colleague to let go of control and surrender to the fruitful engine of coincidence. But he also taught him to shorten the distance between art and life. For Cage maintained that, just as nature’s soundscapes are infinitely richer and more complex than those that arise from sheet music, life with its coincidences also offers more developmental opportunities than a habitual artistic practice. Habit and routine in art are the best prevention against thinking and creating anew.

It is possible, perhaps even likely, that one should arrange oneself quite specifically, as Cage did, to take advantage of this methodical and harmonious anarchy. Cage was particularly interested in the uncreated, and when he rarely turned to older literary material, such as James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, it was to transform the reading into an entirely new form of sound: a kind of whisper.

Dove Bradshaw, the third exhibitor in Roskilde and the only exhibitor at Stalke Gallery in Vesterbro, is, as far as known, the most poetic of the three. She has developed a special ability to work together with nature, both in its forms and processes. Disguised as the pure principle of randomness, nature is allowed to enrich each work in a process that never allows itself to be fully comprehended. And precisely that is the point: that the artistic process always maintains the connection to the unpredictability and the possibilities for surprise, which life itself contains.

Anastasi. Bradshaw. Cage. The Museum of Contemporary Art in Roskilde, Stændertorvet. Until March 11.
Dove Bradshaw, Stalke Gallery, Vesterbrogade 14A. Until February 17.