Site Sante Fe - The Dissolve Opens This Week

While the rest of the art world is anxiously waiting for the results of the über-blue chip Basel art fair, and another part of it gets excited at the sycophantic reality show on Bravo featuring a well-known NYC art critic basking in his 5' of fame, The Dissolve opens at Site Sante Fe this weekend. Of all the 3 events I've just mentioned, The Dissolve is the only real art one that I find exciting.

1) it's a real exhibition, curated by people who clearly know what they are doing, Sarah Lewis and Daniel Belasco,
2) not a commercial event where working stiffs/lackeys of the Late Capital try to unload obscenely priced blue chip works to the obscenely rich in search of either status or money-laundering
and
3) not a spectacle destined to humiliate its participants.

The program is exciting enough, featuring such luminaries as Cindy Sherman, Robert Breer, Kara Walker, Raymond Pettibon, etc. but also famed choreographer Bill T. Jones, as well as historical movies by Dziga Vertov, Lotte Reininger, and the Fleischer studios (I surmise their animations) as well as the Edison Manufacturing Company. The list of participants is very tight ("26 works by 30 international artists"), unlike most of the monstrous other biennials where you usually find 250 artists crammed in too many locations for a normal viewer to take it all in. The duration of this 8th Biennial lasts 6 months, another smart choice they make, meaning it leaves time for people not too broke yet to go and travel to Santa Fe. I wish your truly would have an opportunity to go see it.

Please find below the list of artists and an excerpt from the press release. If you can go there... Enjoy!

"Robert Breer, Paul Chan, Martha Colburn, Thomas Demand, Brent Green, George Griffin, Ezra Johnson, Bill T. Jones & OpenEnded Group, William Kentridge, Avish Khebrehzadeh, Laleh Khorramian, Maria Lassnig, Jennifer & Kevin McCoy, Joshua Mosley, Oscar Muñoz, Jacco Olivier, Raymond Pettibon, Robert Pruitt, Christine Rebet, Mary Reid Kelley, Robin Rhode, Hiraki Sawa, Berni Searle, Cindy Sherman, Federico Solmi, Kara Walker, with historical works by Edison Manufacturing Company, Fleischer Studios, Lotte Reiniger, and Dziga Vertov.

The artists gathered here, working in many mediums, from painting and sculpture to mixed-media installation, alchemically engage with historical models of moving-picture practices. This exhibition displays 26 works by 30 international contemporary artists juxtaposed with four historical animations dating back to the early twentieth century. It is presented through Adjaye Associates' architectural interpretation of the diverse viewing environments of the last hundred years. The result is a visual experience seen through a deliberately bifocal lens, inspired by both contemporary aesthetics and the technical developments of the moving image.

The generative impetus to animate is behind the Biennial's consideration of today's compelling use of technology at the service of the personal touch. What does this new work tell us about technology and that renewable fount of the creative process, the human imagination? Is there another more urgent question behind this new approach? Perhaps it is the search for an authentic voice in the image overload of the Internet and the hand-held that has brought such artists back to an earlier day, when new technology asserted its challenge to the subjective experience of the body. Whatever the impulse, the result is that technology becomes not an end, but a means to more effectively foreground the primacy of the human imagination."