A kind of ”huh ?” exhibition
‘Pigeon Reader’, Simon Morris, 2012. Photo: Peter Heaton.
Exhibition 8 November 2012- 23 March 2013
Les Abattoirs, Toulouse Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art + touring, curated by Jérôme Dupeyrat and Maïwenn Walter
In an interview with Willoughby Sharp made in 1973, Ed Ruscha said about the artist’s books he published in the sixties that all his work aimed for producing “a kind of ‘huh?’:
— I realized that for the first time this book had an inexplicable thing I was looking for, and that was
a kind of « huh? » That’s what I’ve always worked around. All it is is a device to disarm somebody
with my particular message. Lots of artists use that.
— Give me some examples of « Huh? »
— I don’t know, somebody digging a hole out in the desert and calling it sculpture…
“Huh?” : this onomatopoeia stands for “What is it?”, “Why?”, “What does it mean? etc.”
Postscript: Writing After Conceptual Art exhibition
October 12, 2012–February 3, 2013
Museum of Contemporary Art Denver
The exhibition will be traveling to The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery in Toronto, Canada, in June 2013.
Postscript: Writing After Conceptual Art features the work of over fifty artists and writers exploring the artistic possibilities of language. Presenting works from the 1960s to the present, the exhibition includes paintings, sculpture, installation, video and works on paper that raise questions about how we read, look at, hear, and process language today. A major current underlying the exhibition argues that the field of literature known as “conceptual writing” can be seen as engaging in a provocative dialogue with the field of contemporary art, producing new insights into the meaning of both literature and art. Co-curated by Nora Burnett Abrams and Andrea Andersson, Postscript is the first exhibition to examine the work of conceptual writing, investigating the roots of the movement in the art of the 1960s and 70s and presenting contemporary examples of text-based art practices.
