"Destroy, she said"
The BOILER
5 March – 5 April, 2015
Curated by
Saul ANTON and Ethan SPIGLAND
Including work by:
Beth CAMPBELL, Jeff GIBSON, Serban IONESCU, Nina KATCHADOURIAN, Miranda LICHTENSTEIN, Jeanine OLESON, Peter ROSTOVSKY, Ward SHELLEY, Dexter SINISTER, Bob and Roberta SMITH, Ray SMITH, Kate TEALE, and Olav WESTPHALEN
Beth CAMPBELL, Jeff GIBSON, Serban IONESCU, Nina KATCHADOURIAN, Miranda LICHTENSTEIN, Jeanine OLESON, Peter ROSTOVSKY, Ward SHELLEY, Dexter SINISTER, Bob and Roberta SMITH, Ray SMITH, Kate TEALE, and Olav WESTPHALEN
The BOILER
191 N. 14th Street
Brooklyn, NY 11211
T. 718.599.2144
F. 718.599.1666
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Nina Katchadourian
“Monuments to the Unelected, 2009,” Video, Mixed media,
2015
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Ray Smith
“Cradle,” 2015
Styrofoam and foam sculpture from sculpture remnants
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| Olaver Westphalen
Drawings, 1996-2007 (“Tire,” “Tower,” “Smokestacks,” “Cave),” 2015, Ink on paper
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Kate Teale
Destruction of “White Out,”
2015, Destruction of wall drawing
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| Dexter Sinister
Destruction of “Solstice,” 2015, Slide projection c. 2013, Running continuously
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| "Destroy, she said"
Installation view, The Boiler
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| "Destroy, she said"
Installation view, The Boiler
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| Beth Campbell Destruction of “My Potential Future…Sketch (6/11/08),” 2014, HD Video, 4:55 minutes
Co-editing: Cree Nevins. Camera:Beth Campbell, Peter Kreider, Maggie Grymers
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| Bob and Roberta Smith Destruction of “Maps of Hope,” 2015, Destruction of paper maps, enamel paint |
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| Jeff Gibson
Destruction of “Home Sweet Home,” 2015, Archival ink-jet print
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| Miranda Lichtenstein “Destruction of Screen Shadow #10 (stain), 2010,” 2014, Video |
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| Jeanine Oleson Destruction of “Hear, Here,” 2015, Video |
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| Peter Rostovsky
“Portrait,” 2015, Painting, digital video
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| Serban Ionescu Destruction of “Duck, Duck and Duck,” 2013 and “We Can Be Lovers, Despite our Different Taste in Films,” 2014, 2015, Ink on paper, mixed media |
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| Ward Shelley Destruction of “I Am a Hunger Artist,” 2015, Installation, drawings, performance
*All images are courtesy the artist and The
Boiler / Pierogi
"Destroy, she said"
The Boiler and Pierogi are pleased to
present "Destroy, she said", an exhibition featuring the work of Beth Campbell, Jeff
Gibson, Serban Ionescu, Nina Katchadourian, Miranda Lichtenstein, Jeanine
Oleson, Peter Rostovsky, Ward Shelley, Dexter Sinister, Bob and Roberta Smith,
Ray Smith, Kate Teale, and Olav Westphalen.
As difficult as it is to make art,
perhaps it’s even harder to destroy it once it’s made.
Destruction—literally, figuratively,
formally, and conceptually—has a long and well-known pedigree in modern and
contemporary art. From Robert Rauschenberg to Jean Tinguely, Robert Smithson,
Yoko Ono, Gordon Matta-Clark, Gustav Metzger, and Pipilotti Rist, destruction
has served as a rich resource in the evolution of critical art practice and a
key idea in the development of the expanded field of art in the 1960s and
1970s.
Yet what might be its aesthetic and
critical place in culture today? In order to explore these and related
questions, the curators have invited the artists not to destroy just something, but rather one of their own
preexisting works—and to develop a protocol for this act of destruction that
will become, at some level, what is being exhibited. How does the destruction
of an artist’s own work ask us to rethink issues of materiality, performance
and memory? How does it enable us to think about the changing conditions of art
history in the digital age?
Included in the exhibition is a newly
destroyed piece by Bob and Roberta Smith, whose exhibition Art Amnesty was previously shown at Pierogi and is
on view at MoMA P.S.1 through March 23, 2015, and a video documenting the
destruction of faulty elements of Nina Katchadourian’s Monument to the
Unelected, a work
consisting of 56 signs advertising the presidential campaigns of every person
who ever ran for president, and lost, and now in the permanent collection of
the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art (the work was also exhibited at the
Boiler in July, 2012). Also on view will be a re-staging/destruction of Jeanine
Oleson’s Hear, Here
(2014), an experimental Opera produced at the New Museum in April, 2014. Ray
Smith will direct a live destruction of a monumental exquisite corpse-like
sculpture.
The exhibition coincides with the establishment of the Foundation
for Destroyed Art
(www.foundationfordestroyedart.org), a non-profit media archive in which works
of art will exist only in their documented destruction and spectral afterlife.
The aim of the Foundation is to serve as a unique online resource and archive
of destroyed works available in virtual formats, an institution that can hold
if not entirely contain the formlessness of destruction in the field of art.
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