“Pierre Huyghe’s Sleeptalking (D’après Sleep)” Exhibition

Howl! Happening: An Arturo Vega Project

poster for “Pierre Huyghe’s Sleeptalking (D’après Sleep)” Exhibition

This event has ended.

Chapter 6 in Ugo Rondinone: I ♥ John Giorno

Howl! Happening presents Pierre Huyghe’s Sleeptalking (d’après Sleep, 1963 de Andy Warhol, accompagné de la voix de John Giorno) (1998), part of the citywide I ♥ John Giorno festival, opening simultaneously across 13 locations in New York City on June 21, 2017.

More than 30 years after Andy Warhol’s Sleep (1963), Pierre Huyghe made Sleeptalking (d’après Sleep), by filming John Giorno as he slept. The framing is the same, but the subject has aged. As part of a series of works about the notion of interpretation, Pierre Huyghe associates sleep as filmed by Warhol with the dreams and utopias of the 60s. Awoken from his long slumber, the sleeper now speaks and becomes an actor in a different reality, evoking the time he lived and its history.

I ♥ John Giorno is a work of art by the poet’s husband, Swiss artist Ugo Rondinone. The exhibition is a celebration of the life and work of John Giorno—an artist whose work has influenced generations. Taking place in New York City, his hometown, and the East Village in particular, where he has been an almost lifelong resident, the exhibition affords a unique opportunity for Giorno’s contributions to be recognized within the canons of American poetry and art history, while celebrating the artist’s 80th birthday.

In Huyghe’s video projection, the time-marked face imperceptibly changes and rejuvenates. This return to the original Sleep, revealed in the film by a slow fade-out, is accompanied by the poet’s voice. Giorno describes the context of the creation of the film Sleep and the influence of American counterculture on his work. The length of this biographical narrative matches the time taken by this inversion of the biological process from old to young man.

“There’s a big difference between perceiving something, which happens automatically, and discovering things for yourself. One of the reasons why the early 1960s were so great was that everyone—including me, who happened to be there—discovered things for the first time.” (John Giorno)

I ♥ John Giorno is an unprecedented collaboration between leading non-profit and alternative spaces across New York, joining forces for the first time to present a multilayered exhibition on a single subject. Partner venues include Artists Space, High Line Art, Howl! Happening, Hunter College Art Galleries, The Kitchen, New Museum, Red Bull Arts New York, Rubin Museum of Art, Sky Art, Swiss Institute, White Columns, and 80WSE Gallery. Reconfigured as a festival, including installations in galleries and public spaces, as well as a full roster of public programs and events, I ♥ John Giorno is free and open to the public.

Expanding upon the exhibition that took place at Palais de Tokyo in Paris from October 2015 to January 2016, I ♥ John Giorno has been reconceptualized specifically for New York, highlighting Giorno’s significant relationship with the city and his singular role in creating and fostering community here. The 18-part exhibition has been divided by Rondinone into chapters reflecting the layers of Giorno’s life and work, his long-standing influence on and dedication to his chosen hometown of New York City, and his relationships with artist friends, lovers and collaborators including Richard Bosman, Phong Bui, Angela Bulloch, Anne Collier, Verne Dawson, Judith Eisler, Mark Handforth, Matthew Higgs, Pierre Huyghe, Françoise Janicot, Scott King, Elizabeth Peyton, Ugo Rondinone, Erik Satie, Kendall Shaw, Michael Stipe, Billy Sullivan, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Peter Ungerleider, Joan Wallace, and Andy Warhol, whose work will be presented as part of the festival.

The exhibition format echoes the symbiotic relationship between Ugo Rondinone and John Giorno, who have been partners and collaborators for the past two decades. Rondinone describes the show saying: “I ♥ John Giorno is a kaleidoscopic exhibition about the life and work of American poet and Tibetan Buddhist John Giorno, whose rich and stimulating life has woven many threads of American culture and spirituality. Within the dreamscape of the exhibition, one is invited to wander through the juxtaposed realm of art and poetry where image and language build upon themselves in a layered stream of consciousness driven by the biographical, the conceptual, and the emotional.”

I ♥ John Giorno is made possible in part by public funds from Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia. The event’s organizing committee gratefully acknowledges generous support from Van Cleef & Arpels and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Thanks to Almine Rech Gallery, Brussels, London, New York and Paris; Elizabeth Dee Gallery, New York; Esther Schipper, Berlin; Galerie Eva Presenhuber, New York and Zürich; Gladstone Gallery, Brussels and New York; Galerie Kamel Mennour, London and Paris; Kukje Gallery, Seoul; and Sadie Coles, London, for production support. Additional thanks to Ophelia and Bill Rudin as well as the Consulate General of Switzerland in New York for their gracious contribution, and to agnès b. for kind support.

Born in 1936, Giorno is an artistic innovator who has been blurring the lines of poet, performer, political activist, Tibetan Buddhist, and visual artist since he emerged upon the New York art scene in the late 50s. He began producing multimedia, multisensory events concurrent with Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable in the 60s. He worked with Rauschenberg’s Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T) in 1966, and with Bob Moog in 1967-68. His breakthroughs in this area include Dial-A-Poem, first exhibited in 1968 at The Architectural League of New York, and at MoMA’s Information exhibition in 1970. Giorno’s contributions are significant to many culturally defining moments: the Beat Generation, Pop Art, punk, The Pictures Generation, and the hip-hop era. His work is included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Musée National d´Art Moderne, Paris; and Queensland Art Gallery & Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane; among others.

Ugo Rondinone (b. 1964, Brunnen, Switzerland) is a renowned mixed media artist who lives and works in New York. Recent solo shows include: vocabulary of solitude, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam; I ♥ John Giorno, Palais de Tokyo, Paris; artists and poets, Secession, Vienna; breathe walk die, Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai; we run through a desert on burning feet, all of us are flowing our faces look twisted at the Art Institute of Chicago; and seven magic mountains, an installation in Las Vegas, Nevada, organized by Art Production Fund and the Nevada Museum of Art. His work is in the collections of MoMA New York, ICA Boston, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and the Dallas Museum of Art, among others.

[Installation View of Sleeptalking (1998) by Pierre Huyghe at Palais de Tokyo, 2015, © Pierre Huyghe, Courtesy of Palais de Tokyo, Photo: Andre Morin.]

Media

Schedule

from June 21, 2017 to July 31, 2017

Opening Reception on 2017-06-21 from 18:00 to 21:00

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