LiveInYourHead, Exhibition space of the Geneva University of Art and Design, Rue du Beulet 4, 1203 Genève, Wednesday - Saturday, from 2pm to 7pm
Presented by Pauline Beaudemont, Julia Burns, Chloé Delarue, Simone Holliger, Quentin Lannes and Mai-Thu Perret
With Pauline Beaudemont, Larry Bell, Julia Burns, Chloé Delarue, Amy Garofano, Simone Holliger, Donald Judd, Quentin Lannes, Benoît-Marie Moriceau, Olivier Mosset, Virginia Overton, Mai-Thu Perret, Charles Ross and Noam Toran
In December 2012, five students from the Work.Master programme – Julia Burns, Pauline Beaudemont, Chloé Delarue, Simone Holliger and Quentin Lannes, supervised by Mai-Thu Perret – made a study trip to the desert of the American south-west, following in the footsteps of the American avant-garde movements Minimal Art, Land Art and Fetish Finish in the 1960s and 1970s, and focusing on the relationship between work and landscape, site and non-site, space and artistic community.
The whole of the small town of Marfa in southern Texas bears the mark of Donald Judd, who moved there in the early 1970s in search of space, peace and quiet. From 1973 until his death Judd continued to buy up land and buildings, first to live there with his children and later to create permanent installations of his own work and that of artists he liked, on a large scale – a kind of Gesamtkunstwerk, a unique opportunity to see minimal art in situ and understand Judd’s ideas about architecture, design and display. His studio, his library, the small houses he bought to hang up his works among his own furniture and the furniture he collected form a strange cross between a home (an idealized domestic space clearly created to be looked at rather than lived in – most of the houses he renovated to install his works in no longer had a kitchen, and often no bathroom either) and a museum designed for one man, a mausoleum dwelling of the kind built by Chinese emperors, an ideal home that would last after their deaths. The presence in Marfa of the Judd and Chinati foundations has put this middle-of-nowhere town on the map of tourist destinations. Today it is a liberal enclave in the midst of Texas, with its bar where you can meet colourful personalities who have lived in New York or even Europe, its film festival and its studios belonging to artists who have gone there in search of not just peace and emptiness, but also a sense of community. From Marfa we moved on to New Mexico to meet the artist Charles Ross and visit his Star Axis, a Land Art project on which he has been working ever since 1971. Situated on top of a black sandstone mesa, and eventually eleven storeys tall, it is a stone pyramid from which you can observe the movement of stars and their relationship to the earth’s axis. The final stage of the trip was a visit to Larry Bell’s studio in Taos, a small mountain town where Agnes Martin also lived.
Electric Fields is an attempt to record this road trip through work produced for the exhibition by the students involved and work by artists we met en route, such as Olivier Mosset (who travelled part of the way with us) or Amy Garofano (who was working as Charles Ross’s assistant during our visit). LiveInYourHead is conceived as a place of encounter and documentation, with furniture made at a workshop on Judd’s furniture and reproductions of murals painted by cowboys in the 1950s and discovered in an abandoned house a few kilometres from the Mexican border. During the exhibition, visitors will able to attend a performance by the musician Rick Wreck (who will perform the music that was always playing in the car during our trip), look at documentary videos and other works on art from the region, enjoy a brunch made up of dishes inspired by minimal art, have their hair cut by Ryan González, Marfa’s hairdresser who will come over to Geneva for the occasion, or watch cult films from the Marfa Film Festival.
Thursday 30 May 2013 from 6 p.m.
Musical accompaniment by Rick Wreck
Saturday 1 June 2013 from 2 to 6 p.m.
With Ryan González
Sunday 2 June 2013 from 12 to 3 p.m.
Reservation: electricfields.brunch@gmail.com
Thursday 6 June from 7 p.m.
Marfa Mystery Lights by Charles de Meaux, 2008
Marfa Girls by Larry Clark, 2012
The Last Picture Show by Peter Bogdanovich, 1971
True Stories by David Byrne, 1986
Furniture in collaboration with Harold Bouvard