canadamontreal

Tacita Dean, Merce Cunningham performs STILLNESS (in three movements) to John Cage’s composition 4’33” with Trevor Carlson, New York City, 28 April 2007, (six performances; six films), 2008, Installation view at Dia: Beacon, Beacon, NY, Courtesy the artist, Marian Goodman Gallery, New York and Paris, and Frith Street Gallery, London.

Musée d'Art
Contemporain de Montréal
185, Sainte-Catherine Ouest
514 847-6226
Montréal
Tacita Dean
October 10, 2009-
January 3, 2010

How to choreograph silence. That was the challenge issued by artist Tacita Dean to the great American choreographer Merce Cunningham, who revolutionized modern dance.

In 2007, British artist Tacita Dean invited Cunningham to choreograph John Cage’s composition 4’33’’. That piece — a 4-minute, 33-second silence “performed” in three movements — was highly influential in twentieth-century music and very emotional for the choreographer: Cage, who died in 1992, was his long-time collaborator and life partner. Cunningham, who was 88 at the time and in a wheelchair, accepted the challenge. On the afternoon of April 28, 2007, in the New York studios of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, Dean filmed a total of six takes. Seated on a chair, before a wall of rehearsal-room mirrors, Cunningham performed silence by remaining immobile, adjusting his pose slightly between each of the movements in response to a signal from Trevor Carlson, the company’s director.

The show consists of an installation of six projections on screens arranged around the exhibition space, entitled Merce Cunningham performs STILLNESS (in three movements) to John Cage’s composition 4’33’’ with Trevor Carlson, New York City, 28 April 2007. Each projection corresponds to one of the six performances presented by Cunningham and filmed by Dean. With 4’33’’, Cage set out to compose a piece made of unbroken silence. In Stillness, Cunningham transposes this silence into immobility and Dean uses a still camera, shooting each performance from a different angle. The screens’ dimensions are calibrated so that the choreographer, whether seen in close-up or long shot, is life-size. Here, music, dance and film simultaneously share a common space-time with the visitor.

Born in 1965, in Canterbury, England, Tacita Dean explores various media, including drawing, photography and sound, but made her name internationally with her films documenting the passage of time. She has taken part in many solo and group exhibitions since 1992, at Dia:Beacon (2008), Solomon Guggenheim Museum, New York (2007), Schaulager, Munchenstein/Basel, Switzerland (2006), National Gallery of Contemporary Art, Oslo, Norway (2006), Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris (2003) and Tate Britain (2001), among others. Closer to us here, she participated in the 2000 Biennale de Montréal. She has won the Kurt Schwitters Prize (Germany, 2009) and the Hugo Boss Prize (United States, 2006), and was nominated for the Millennium Prize awarded by the National Gallery of Canada in 2001 and for the 1998 Turner Prize. Tacita Dean lives and works in Berlin.

The presentation at the Musée d’art contemporain is the artist’s first solo exhibition in Canada.

This work examining silence and the passage of time takes on added poignancy with the death of Merce Cunningham this past July.

The exhibition Tacita Dean was curated by Mark Lanctôt, curator at the Musée.

John William Waterhouse (Rome, 1849-London, 1917), Cleopatra, 1888, Oil on canvas, Private Collection, courtesy of Christie's.

John William Waterhouse (Rome, 1849-London, 1917), The Lady of Shalott, 1888, Oil on canvas, Tate, London, Gift of Sir Henry Tate, 1894, Photo © Tate, London, 2009.

John William Waterhouse, RA (1849-1917), Miranda, 1875, Oil on canvas, 76.2 x 101.5 cm, Collection of Robert and Ann Wiggins, USA.

Anonymous, J.W. Waterhouse with his two Academy exhibits of 1898, Flora and the Zephyrs, left, and Ariadne, 40.5 x 56 cm, Victoria and Albert Museum, London, Inv. E.526-2008.

John William Waterhouse, RA (1849-1917), A Mermaid, 1900. Oil on canvas, 96.5 x 66.6 cm. Royal Academy of Arts, London. Photo © Royal Academy of Arts, London.

John William Waterhouse, RA (1849-1917), St Eulalia, 1885. Oil on canvas, 188.6 x 117.5 cm. Tate: Presented by Sir Henry Tate 1894. Photo © Tate, London 2009.

John William Waterhouse, RA (1849-1917), Circe Invidiosa: Circe Poisoning the Sea, 1892. Oil on canvas, 180.7 x 87.4 cm. South Australian Government Grant 1892. Art Gallery of South Australia.

Montreal Museum
of Fine Arts
1380 Sherbrooke West
514-285-2000
J.W. Waterhouse
Garden of Enchantment
October 2, 2009-
February 7, 2010

After the Royal Academy of Arts, London, and the Groninger Museum, the Netherlands, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts hosts the largest-ever retrospective of the British painter John William Waterhouse (1849-1917). Thanks to generous loans from the Tate Gallery, the Art Gallery of Ontario and the Leeds Art Gallery, the Museum presents all three versions of The Lady of Shalott, the artist’s most celebrated and popular work. This is the first time these three works have been presented together. Bringing together some eighty works, paintings and works on paper, J. W. Waterhouse: Garden of Enchantment is the first international exhibition on Waterhouse since 1978 and the first to feature the entire artistic career of this modern Pre-Raphaelite, a compelling artist with a fertile imagination and a fascination with the femme fatale of literature, both as enchantress of ancient times and romantic heroine. Several of these works have not been exhibited since Waterhouse’s death. Gravitating increasingly to a baneful or bewitching symbolism, between spiritualism and occultism, Waterhouse’s aesthetics have also stood the test of time to inspire contemporary artists, whose works will be included in this exhibition. The exhibition is produced by the Groninger Museum in the Netherlands, in collaboration with the Royal Academy of Arts, London, and the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.

“Why bring Waterhouse to Montreal? A quintessentially English product of the Royal Academy in London, where he would spend his entire career, J. W. Waterhouse was nevertheless stylistically the most French of the Pre-Raphaelites. He also had close ties with many of the artists whose works were collected by the Art Association of Montreal, the precursor to the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. At the same time, he scandalized his peers and critics of his time with his more modern paint handling, borrowed from Naturalist and Impressionist schools across the Channel. This is why I wanted to invite Waterhouse to Montreal,” said Nathalie Bondil, Director of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.

This retrospective features about 50 paintings that are among the finest and most spectacular of the artist’s production, on loan from public and private collections in Australia, England, Ireland, Taiwan, the United States and Canada. In addition to the iconic Lady of Shalott other major works appearing in this presentation include Ariadne, inspired by Ovid’s Heroïdes, dated 1898 and exhibited the same year at the Royal Academy, his Saint Cecilia from the collection of the Andrew Lloyd Webber Art Foundation, produced when he was at the apogee of his career. •A Naiad• and Nymphs Finding the Head of Orpheus come from the collection of Sir Tim Rice. Among loans from the Tate is Saint Eulalia, the first in a long series of heroines who suffered an unjust fate. The canvas of Shakespeare’s Miranda, which had disappeared without trace, was rediscovered in Scotland in 2006. The Favourites of the Emperor Honorius, the painting inspired by ancient mythology that definitively established Waterhouse’s reputation, was the first of his works to enter a public collection, that of the Art Gallery of South Australia. The Underworld – a place he often alluded to in his mythological paintings — appears in Ulysses and the Sirens and in Psyche Opening the Golden Box. The Danaïdes, carrying heavy copper jugs, were eternally condemned to fill a perpetually leaking vessel to atone for their crime.

The exhibition also includes some thirty exquisite studies in oil, chalk and pencil, and a book of poems by Alfred, Lord Tennyson belonging to the artist. Waterhouse, who greatly admired the poet, drew a pencil sketch on the cover. Tennyson’s poem The Palace of Art provided the inspiration for the painter’s Saint Cecilia, and his Lady of Shalott is the subject of three of Waterhouse’s most famous paintings.

Often associated with the Pre-Raphaelites, who aimed to recapture the beauty and simplicity of the medieval world, Waterhouse was also a classical painter. The exhibition will show how his paintings reflect his engagement with the themes of the day — medievalism, classical heritage, spiritualism and the •femme fatale•. Born the year the Pre-Raphaelites first exhibited at the Royal Academy, he inherited their enthusiasm for Tennyson, Keats and Shakespeare. He was captivated by legends of enchantresses, the underworld and beauty, and his paintings reveal a romantic fascination with intense female passion: among his subjects are the Lady of Shalott, Cleopatra, Circe, Lamia, the Sirens tormenting Ulysses, and Mariamne condemned to death. He found inspiration in Romantic literature and also in Greek mythology as interpreted by Homer and Ovid.

Although Waterhouse’s work is admired by millions worldwide, the general public actually knows relatively little about the man himself and his artistic production. Waterhouse is often described as a modern Pre-Raphaelite, but the style he developed distinguishes him from his truly Pre-Raphaelite forerunners. In 1886, he discovered the Ophelia (1851-1852) by the Pre-Raphaelite John Everett Millais and simultaneously became influenced by the spontaneity of Impressionism through the work of English artists like William Logsdail, Frank Bramley and the Newlyn and Primrose Hill schools. The 20th-century scholars who rediscovered the Pre-Raphaelites often marginalized Waterhouse for such seemingly contradictory tendencies, yet it is these which have endeared him to art lovers today. The exhibition will place his best-known works in the context of his whole career to illustrate why Waterhouse can be regarded as one of the major interpreters of the classical and romantic tradition.

The artist was born in Rome in 1849 to a family of British artists who returned to London when he was five. Even at a very young age, Waterhouse helped in his father’s studio, where he learned about art and developed an interest in painting, sculpture and classical antiquity. In 1870, he was admitted to the Royal Academy School and gradually developed his own style in original and melancholy pictures inspired by ancient Greece and Rome. In 1895, he became a member of the Academy, which established his reputation. His dramatic, richly coloured paintings featuring beautiful women brought him renown throughout the British Empire and at the World Exhibitions of 1890 and 1900.

Curators are Patty Wageman (director of the Groninger Museum), Peter Trippi (author of the monograph J. W. Waterhouse [2002] and editor in chief of Fine Art Connoisseur, New York), Elizabeth Prettejohn (Professor of History of Art, University of Bristol) and Robert Upstone (Curator of Modern British Art at the Tate Britain, London) are the four curators of the exhibition.

The exhibition’s presentation at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts is under the direction of Nathalie Bondil, Director and Chief Curator, with the assistance of Anne Grace, Curator of Modern Art.

The exhibition’s original design with its keynote of sorcery was created by two Montrealers. Nathalie Claude is an actor, director, dancer, avant-garde choreographer and writer, a member of the Momentum collective. Raymond Marius Boucher is a designer who has worked for Montreal’s leading theatre companies as well as in film, television, the visual arts, entertainment and dance.

John William Waterhouse (Rome, 1849-London, 1917), Circe Offering the Cup to Ulysses, 1891, Oil on canvas, Gallery Oldham, Gift of Marjorie Lees, 1952.

John William Waterhouse (Rome, 1849-London, 1917), The Lady of Shalott, 1894, Oil on canvas, Leeds Art Gallery, Purchased in 1895, © Leeds Museums and Galleries (City Art Gallery) U.K. / The Bridgeman Art Library.

John William Waterhouse (Rome, 1849-London, 1917), St. Cecilia, 1895, Oil on canvas, Private collection, courtesy of Christie's.

John William Waterhouse (Rome, 1849-London, 1917), The Danaïdes, 1888, Oil on canvas, Aberdeen Art Gallery and Museums, Purchased in 1927, Photo Aberdeen Art Gallery & Museums Collections.

Exhibition Speed Limits, 2009, View of the installation at the CCA, © CCA, Montréal.

Irving Trust Company Building Site, 1 Wall Street, New York City, 16 January 1930, Centre Canadien d’Architecture/Canadian Centre for Architecture Collection, Montréal, Irving Underhill Inc. (United States; active New York City, 1896-1950),

Irving Trust Company Building Site, 1 Wall Street, New York City, 4 February 1930, Centre Canadien d’Architecture/Canadian Centre for Architecture Collection, Montréal, Irving Underhill Inc. (United States; active New York City, 1896-1950).

Irving Trust Company Building Site, 1 Wall Street, New York City, 15 February 1930, Centre Canadien d’Architecture/Canadian Centre for Architecture Collection, Montréal, Underhill, Inc. (United States; active New York City, 1896-1950).

Irving Trust Company Building Site, 1 Wall Street, New York City, 17 March 1930, Centre Canadien d’Architecture/Canadian Centre for Architecture Collection, Montréal, Irving Underhill, Inc. (United States; active New York City, 1896-1950).

Irving Trust Company Building Site, 1 Wall Street, New York City, 15 April 1930, Centre Canadien d’Architecture/Canadian Centre for Architecture Collection , Montréal, Irving Underhill, Inc. (United States; active New York City, 1896-1950).

Irving Trust Company Building Site, 1 Wall Street, New York City, 1 July 1930, Centre Canadien d’Architecture/Canadian Centre for Architecture Collection , Montréal, Irving Underhill, Inc. (United States; active New York City, 1896-1950).

Irving Trust Company Building Site, 1 Wall Street, New York City, 1 August 1930, Centre Canadien d’Architecture/Canadian Centre for Architecture Collection, Montréal, Irving Underhill, Inc. (United States; active New York City, 1896-1950.

Canadian Centre
for Architecture
1920, rue Baile
514-939-7026
Montréal
Speed Limits
May 20-October 12, 2009

Speed Limits is devoted to the inescapable presence of speed in modern life, in art, architecture and urbanism, and in the graphic arts, economics, and the material culture of the industrial age and our own age of information. The exhibition spotlights the hundredth anniversary of Italian Futurism, the movement to which we owe the famous statement that appeared in its founding manifesto: “The world’s magnificence has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed.” The exhibition is co-organised with The Wolfsonian-Florida International University in Miami Beach and is curated by Jeffrey T. Schnapp of the Stanford Humanities Lab.

Critical rather than commemorative in spirit, Speed Limits explores a single Futurist theme from the standpoint of its contemporary legacies. The exhibition probes the powers and limits of the modern era’s cult of speed in the domains of circulation and transit, construction and the built environment, efficiency, the measurement and representation of rapid motion, and the mind/body relationship. A variety of objects spanning a 100-year cultural history reveal the long-standing polarities and closely intertwined relationship between the fast and the slow.

“In recent years, the Canadian Centre for Architecture has undertaken a number of projects addressing the question of limits – the limits of visual perception in Sense of the City, of postwar notions of progress in 1973: Sorry, Out of Gas, and of Modern urbanism and top-down planning in Actions: What You Can Do With the City,” said Mirko Zardini, Director of the CCA. “All of these exhibitions identified inventive and original ways of challenging some founding myths of contemporary life, while bringing to light practices that are shaping daily experience. Speed Limits investigates one of the greatest of these myths, and challenges us to find alternatives to the reliance on speed in contemporary society.”

The exhibition features more than 240 objects from the collections of the CCA and The Wolfsonian, including books, photographs, advertising posters, architectural drawings, publications, and videos, which together illustrate the debate about speed and present a multifaceted view that is both a defence of speed and an implicit criticism of its negative effect on contemporary life. Covering the period from 1900 to the present, the exhibition analyzes the evolution of the process of production and construction, the beginnings of prefabrication, the household, traffic and transit, and the workplace, as viewed through the prism of speed, and focuses on the opposite poles of productivity and hyperactivity.

Conceived and installed in a linear fashion, each of the five distinct but interrelated themes is explored in its own gallery: Pace, Traffic, Fast Construction, Efficiency, Motion Capture and Measuring, and Mind/Body.

The exhibition introduces juxtaposing notions of fast and slow via two large-scale video projections. Entering the first gallery, visitors occupy the space between a slow-moving snail seen on a ceiling screen above, and footage of a vibrant cityscape on the floor below. The room also contains a group of Futurist material including a reproduction of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s Manifesto of Futurism published in Le Figaro on 20 February 1909.

Multiple perceptions of traffic and its models are vital to an understanding of the city and society. The exhibition bears witness to the prevalent dream of an urban space with freely-flowing traffic, and illustrates the concept of the grid or network that governs the movement not only of objects and goods but also of information. This is juxtaposed with the breakdown of circulation, the traffic jam. The overcrowding of city streets is captured in a series of photographs John Veltri took in New York City in 1938. Visual records are accompanied by archival documents and studies of transportation efficiency and accident patterns related to increasing speeds.

Architecture is a motive force behind the speeding-up of life, reflected in the increasing efficiency of construction processes. The phenomenon is illustrated through photographic sequences capturing the erection of the Irving Trust Building (New York), the Eiffel Tower (Paris), and Rem Koolhaas’s China Central Television building (Beijing). The fast pace of construction of these and other buildings can be analyzed by studying dated sequential images. While the quickly built Empire State Building was a masterpiece of construction, Andy Warhol’s film Empire represents it in stark contrast, as a static “moving image.”

Prefabrication served as a major drive towards increasing construction efficiency, and is represented by various trade catalogues of homes and other building types, as well as photographs documenting their assembly. The exhibition includes works by J.J.P. Oud and Cedric Price, reflecting the sustained interest in modular housing by architects throughout the 20th century.

Examining how notions of efficient production evolved over time, the exhibition focuses on two types of space transformed by speed, one public and the other domestic: the office and the kitchen.

Filing systems, processors, and office furniture play a central role making work spaces fast and efficient. A remarkable 1936 project by Josef Ehm features an electrically-powered mechanical classifier, allowing workers of the Central Social Institution in Prague to access large-scale card catalogues via mechanised desks on lifts. The exhibition also includes photographs by Balthazar Korab that capture the modernized workspaces of the 1960s, as well as studies of the productivity of workers and their equipment such as Frank B. Gilbreth’s films of American workers in the 1910s and ‘20s. Photographs of Christine Frederick show her testing and demonstrating kitchen efficiencies in the early 20th century, when electrification, new equipment and appliances, and a redesigned space increase the speed of domestic activities. Alongside commercial artefacts and documentation, the exhibition includes architects’ studies such as drawings by Le Corbusier analysing kitchen dimensions and by Cedric Price for modular kitchen in a prefabricated steel house.

Addressing the cognitive challenges with which humanity is surrounded, the exhibition features material about information compression through strata of signs, signals and messages, or diagrams that reduce complex traffic data to a usable visual representation. Increasingly, humans are processing complex overlapping of information including time and related data. This growth is reflected in a collection of clocks and calendars illustrating the tempo of modern life, and the increasing sophistication and number of instruments and devices that measure motion: accelerometers, altimeters, odometers, speedometers.

Also presented are posters and graphics whose design captures the notion of speed in order to more effectively promote cars, tires, oils, and other products or services built celebrating new levels of speed.

The exhibition suggests different ways in which acceleration is associated on the one hand with pleasure — ecstasy, the search for powerful sensations, and overstimulation — and on the other with exhaustion, risk, and injury. Representations of the body in motion include the transformation of the body itself into a speeding object, gymnastics and popular athleticism in the early 20th century, the current cult of the body, natural and artificial improvements in physical culture, stimulants and tranquilizers, and the remedies associated with stimulants. Among speed’s pharmaceutical avatars are caffeine, cocaine, amphetamines, and the active ingredients in energy drinks.

This final gallery bridges the century by combining the photographic studies of motion conducted by Edward Muybridge in 1887 with a large-scale projection of Usein Bolt’s record-breaking performance at the 2008 Olympic Games.

Speed Limits is co-organised by the Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montréal, and The Wolfsonian-Florida International University, Miami Beach. The exhibition is curated by Jeffrey T. Schnapp, Pierotti Chair in Italian Literature at Stanford University. Schnapp is professor of French, Italian, and Comparative Literature and founder of the Stanford Humanities Lab, a transdisciplinary research centre devoted to exploring scenarios for future production and reproduction of knowledge in art and the humanities. He is a cultural historian and a researcher whose eclectic interests range from medieval poetry to contemporary architecture and design. Schnapp recently edited Crowds (with Matthew Tiews, Stanford University Press, 2006), which received the Modernist Studies Association prize for best book of 2007, and Italiamerica (with Emanuela Scarpellini, Il Saggiatore, 2008), and published a collection of essays, Neoantiqua (Eduerj, 2008). He curated I Trentini e la Grande Guerra, an experimental exhibition on World War I installed in two abandoned highway tunnels in Trento, Italy, for the Fondazione Museo Storico del Trentino, and Casa per tutti, in collaboration with Fulvio Irace, for the Triennale di Milano (May to September 1, 2008).

The exhibition installation is designed by Los Angeles-based Michael Maltzan Architecture, with graphics by New York-based Project Projects. Both Michael Maltzan Architecture and Project Projects were recently named 2009 Finalists for the prestigious Cooper-Hewitt National Design Award in recognition of the excellence, innovation, and public impact of their work.

Established in 1995, Michael Maltzan Architecture (MMA) is dedicated to engaging the realm of interaction between the built environment and its users, and to exploring the complexity and possibility inherent in architecture in order to foster actual experiences and change. MMA designs a wide range of projects, which include many cultural and research institutions such as the Getty Information Institute Digital Laboratory, Kidspace Children’s Museum in Pasadena, the temporary MoMA QNS, and the Vancouver Art Gallery.

Founded in 2004 by Prem Krishnamurthy and Adam Michaels, Project Projects is a New York-based design studio focusing on print, exhibition, and interactive work with clients in art and architecture. The large-scale text in Speed Limits is set in “Luigi,” a custom typeface designed by Project Projects for use in the exhibition. The font is primarily inspired by the title page from Luigi Russolo’s 1916 L’Arte dei rumori (The Art of Noises), a Futurist manifesto stating the need for new music responding to intensified levels of noise in urban, industrialized daily life.

Speed Limits is accompanied by a catalogue of the same title, edited by Jeffrey T. Schnapp, co-published by the Canadian Centre for Architecture, The Wolfsonian-Florida International University and Skira Editore, Milan. The catalogue contains prefaces by Mirko Zardini, Director of the CCA, and Cathy Leff, Director of The Wolfsonian. It includes new essays by Timothy Alborn, Yve-Alain Bois, Edward Dimendberg, Maria Gough, Antonino Mastruzzo, Jeffrey L. Meikle, Pierre Niox, Marjorie Perloff, Mark Seltzer, and Anthony Vidler; an anthology of historical texts; the visual essay Rush City by Jeffrey T. Schnapp; and studies of the impact of speed on contemporary society.

The 320-page book contains 140 colour and black-and-white illustrations. It is available in an English edition for $47 CAD at the CCA Bookstore as of May 2009.

Photomontage of projects by Mart Stam from the 1920s, 1930, Centre Canadien d’Architecture/Canadian Centre for Architecture Collection, Montréal, Ilse Bing, (Frankfurt am Main, Germany, 1899-New York City, New York, 1998)