SEVENTH DREAM OF TEENAGE HEAVEN
JANUARY 27–MARCH 12, 2011
Produced by Bureau for Open Culture for Columbus College of Art & Design
60 Cleveland Avenue, Columbus, Ohio, USA
Opening Reception: Thursday, January 27, 6–8 p.m.
www.bureauforopenculture.org
Taking its title from the 1984 album of the same name by the British pop band Love and Rockets, the exhibition Seventh Dream of Teenage Heaven explores the way life is charged with an underlying awareness of the passage of time marked by the physical, aural, and visual residues of our culture. Collective and individual memories of the past are embedded in materials, sounds, and sites, which often connect with personal experiences and defi ne entire epochs. The social relations and styles of recent generations are evident in the material culture of cassette tapes, vinyl, and Polaroids; the actions of dancing, surfi ng, skateboarding, and bicycling; and built environments, from neglected urban cores to safe suburban peripheries.
Seventh Dream of Teenage Heaven refl ects upon these ideas within larger contexts of modernist and postmodernist theories related to past, present, and future. The exhibition will feature 42 works by 17 artists working in a wide range of media, including photography, video, painting, sculpture, social intervention, and sound installation.
The exhibition is organized, according to curator James Voorhies, along “a kind of sweet-to sour trajectory.” As viewers enter the fi rst gallery, they encounter I Am a Victim of This Song, a sung-and-screamed version of Chris Isaak’s 1989 hit single “Wicked Game” performed by the Swiss artist Pipilotti Rist. This video, along with a photography installation by Timothy Nazzaro, photographs and a video by Cassandra Troyan, and a sound installation by Lara Kohl, set a slightly innocent, even optimistic, tone, evoking what viewers might readily conjure upon hearing the word “teenager.” As visitors proceed throughout the remaining fi ve galleries, the exhibition becomes increasingly dark and foreboding. Pushing Up the Power, a video by the Spanish artist Alejandro Vidal of a rave set against a melancholic soundtrack, and photographs of urban decay and abandon from the Cologne-based Joachim Brohm’s OHIO series, are installed in the fourth gallery and contribute to this tone. The exhibition concludes with a work by the British artist Mark Leckey, whose hypnotic video projection Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore is a bacchanalia of scenes of British teenagers dancing and partying from the 1970s through the early 1990s. As a look back at the evolution of popular clothes, habits, and actions, it is what one reviewer has called an “extended paean to the unadulterated bliss of nocturnal abandon.” Photographs from the work 1984 and Beyond by the Irish artist Gerard Byrne are also installed in the fi nal gallery. 1984 and Beyond comprises three single-channel videos and a series of 20 black-and-white photographs. The work is based on a 1963 conversation published in Playboy among 12 science fi ction writers who speculate on the incredible changes to come in the future—in 1984. Seventh Dream of Teenage Heaven will feature the black-and-white photographs from this work taken by Byrne in 2005, which reveal how little the world has actually changed since 1963 and how disappointing the future has come to be. The participation of the American artist Mary Lum takes form only in the printed matter of the catalogue; her work is inspired by the modernist visions of Le Corbusier’s Color Keyboard, aswatch book he designed in 1931, then another version in 1959 as a commission for a wallpaper manufacturing company. Le Corbusier sought to unite the built environment, nature, and music. Lum has an astute and uncanny ability to interweave and connect disparate sights, colors, arrangements, and experiences that at fi rst seem merely residues of everyday life. She corrals and organizes them to give new insight into the haphazard and the overlooked.
PARTICIPATING ARTISTS
Guy Ben-Ner, Joachim Brohm, Gerard Byrne, Malcolm Cochran, Peter Dayton, Ben Kinsley, Lara Kohl, Jeremy Kost, Mark Leckey, Mary Lum, Dennis McNulty, Timothy Nazzaro, Johannes Nyholm, Pipilotti Rist, Cassandra Troyan, Jeff rey Vallance, and Alejandro Vidal.
ABOUT CURATOR JAMES VOORHIES
James Voorhies is a curator, an art historian, and the director of Bureau for Open Culture. He has produced numerous exhibitions of international contemporary art and has taught at the San Francisco Art Institute and Parsons The New School for Design. He is the director of exhibitions at Columbus College of Art & Design. Previously he served as deputy director at the Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, and he has worked in curatorial departments at the Brooklyn Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Voorhies has written essays for several exhibition catalogues, edited publications, and made academic contributions to the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s online education resource, Timeline of Art History. He is currently a visiting faculty member at Bennington College in Vermont.
ABOUT BUREAU FOR OPEN CULTURE
Bureau for Open Culture is a curatorial and pedagogic institution for the contemporary arts. It works intentionally to reimagine the art exhibition as a discursive form of education that creates a kind of new public sphere or new institution. Exhibitions take shape as installations, screenings, informal talks, and performances and occur in parking lots, storefronts, libraries, industrial sites, country roads, gardens, and galleries. They respond to the issues of these situations, operating in real time. In doing so they generate platforms for learning and knowledge production that make ideas accessible, relevant, and inviting for diverse audiences. This model encourages overlaps of art, science, ecology, the built environment, philosophy, and design. To realize this work, Bureau for Open Culture initiates and cultivates collaborations with institutions such as Columbus College of Art & Design, MASS MoCA, Portland State University, and Bennington College.
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