Paul Chan “The Hugo Boss Prize 2014: Nonprojections for New Lovers”
Guggenheim Museum
This event has ended.
Paul Chan is the winner of the 2014 Hugo Boss Prize, a biennial award honoring artists who have made a visionary contribution to contemporary art. Over the past fifteen years, Chan’s wide-ranging projects have taken the shape of documentary videos, animated projections, charcoal drawings, conceptual typefaces, and public performances. In 2010 he founded Badlands Unlimited, an experimental publishing enterprise that has become an integral element of his work. Conceived to “make books in an expanded field,” Badlands has produced titles as GIFs, PDFs, and even a stone tablet, in addition to print and e-book formats.
In a similar spirit, the works in this exhibition consider what it might mean to make images in an expanded field, probing the notion of visual projection. Tetra Gummi Phone (2014–15) presents a moving image in material form. Described by the artist as a sculptural animation, this composition of white nylon fabric set in motion by industrial fans evokes an otherworldly apparition and draws on the ancient Greek concept of pneuma, meaning “breath” or “spirit.” An installation of works from Chan’s series Nonprojections (2013– ) features video projectors that are linked to jury-rigged, power-conducting shoes. Although the projectors’ lenses flicker and strobe as if outputting videos, there is no corresponding surface on which imagery might appear. Holding their contents within, these would-be projections remain illegible phantoms, replacing a passive experience of moving images with one that Chan characterizes as “inner-directed, like the ghostly visual impressions that one conjures up in one’s mind when reading a good (or bad) book.” The seemingly absurd titles of the individual works play on the names of Greek philosophers including Socrates and Plato, suggesting a link to the allegory of the cave—a parable of human perception that exhorts us to acknowledge the illusion of sensory information and embrace a truer understanding of reality.
On the occasion of this exhibition, Chan premieres a Badlands series titled New Lovers. Inspired by Maurice Girodias’s radical Olympia Press—founded in Paris in 1953 as a platform for censored works by such authors as Samuel Beckett, William S. Burroughs, and Vladimir Nabokov—New Lovers presents fiction by emerging writers working in the genre of erotica, a literary form with the potential to stir imaginings powerful enough to animate the body.
—Katherine Brinson, Curator, Contemporary Art, and Susan Thompson, Assistant Curator
Media
Schedule
from March 06, 2015 to May 13, 2015