NYAB Event - Pierre Bismuth “Where is Rocky II? Teaser”

Pierre Bismuth “Where is Rocky II? Teaser”

Team Gallery

This event has ended.

Team (gallery, inc.) presents a solo show by Brussels-based, French artist Pierre Bismuth. Entitled Where is Rocky II? Trailer-Teaser, the exhibition will run from 29 March through 26 April 2015. Concurrently, our 47 Wooster Street space will host a program of works by Alex Bag, Marc Hundley and Santiago Sierra.

For this exhibition, Bismuth will present a new video work featuring artist Lawrence Weiner entitled Where is Rocky II-Teaser, which makes formal reference to the standard audio-visual device utilized by the entertainment industry to announce upcoming films. The video will be exhibited in conjunction with Where is Rocky II-Trailer.

The premise of this work is Bismuth’s suspicion that in the 1970s, artist Ed Ruscha may have fabricated and hidden a completely unknown sculpture titled Rocky II in the vast and desolate landscape of the Californian desert. This object, an artificial boulder hidden amongst real ones, has remained undetected for nearly forty years. Though Ruscha has recently confirmed the existence of the sculpture, he has refused to supply any further information. The inconclusive circuit of the object’s whereabouts and the shadowy narrative that accompanies it serve as the jumping off point for Where is Rocky II-Teaser.

Narrated by Lawrence Weiner and written by Bismuth and Aaron Schuster, Where is Rocky II-Teaser examines the dark historical chronology of Joshua Tree (the site where the Ruscha work is supposedly hidden) from 1870 to 1976. Detailing a series of legendary disappearances, deaths, fakes, supernatural encounters and cinematic illusions, the teaser situates Ruscha’s object firmly in the mythology of the landscape. This narrative suggests a history specific to Los Angeles in which the fraudulent cannot be teased from the factual, a symbiotic relationship wherein fiction and reality are granted equal gravity.

Weiner’s participation serves a bifold purpose- the sonorous familiarity of his voice is not only a reference to the traditional cinematic teasers that well known Hollywood figures lend their voices to, but it likewise creates an improbable bridge between conceptual art and the entertainment industry. Echoing the gesture established by Ruscha’s concealment of a fake boulder among identical real ones, Where Is Rocky II-Teaser examines the slippery relationship between the real and the super-real, between what something purports itself to be and what it actually is.

Pierre Bismuth (b. 1963) has been exhibiting his work internationally for over twenty years. Prominent monographic exhibitions have been held at the Kunsthalle in Basel, Nice’s Villa Arson, Rotterdam’s Witte de With, MAMCO in Geneva, and most recently the Kunsthalle in Vienna. His work was included in the 2001 Venice Biennale, in Manifesta 4 and in the 11th Biennale de Lyon, 2011. In 2002, Bismuth won an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay, alongside Michel Gondry and Charlie Kaufman, for the film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.