Failing to Levitate
June 6—July 3, 2014
Curated by Kerry Downey and Natasha Marie Llorens
Anhoek School (orchestrated by Mary Walling Blackburn and Rafael Kelman)
A Pattern
Malin Arnell
Ethan Breckenridge
Dillon de Give
Bill Dietz
Danyel Ferrari
Rachel Higgins
Mitch McEwen
Glendalys Medina
Jen Rosenblit
With guest speaker Heather Love.
Failing to Levitate is a platform to think about failure and vulnerability in art practices that are based in the social, in the encounter between people. The project links spaces, bodies, objects, and events in order to consider the ways we gather, socialize, and are affected by the physical conditions of shared space: elevators, board rooms, cars, group exhibitions, Times Square, dance floors...
As curators we decided to borrow our title from Bruce Nauman's eponymous photograph, which shows the artist earnestly attempting to levitate in his studio and then slumping to the floor awkwardly when he fails. This work speaks to the (still) heroic narrative of the lone artist striving towards transcendence through an act of sheer will. We address failure and vulnerability as key terms in this project because any real discussion of either outside of a binary structure challenges the idea of self-mastery. Self-mastery, an ideology that tolerates no weakness, is in turn foundational to masculinism. We appropriate "failing to levitate" in order to attend, instead, to how physical and social spaces fail us, or create spaces for being vulnerable together.
As a result of the varying gestures, experiments, and performances included in this show, the social space of the gallery becomes a space of persistent shift; between artists, from performance to event, between built form and embodied experience. To be vulnerable is to admit that we do not make meaning alone, that we come into being through the recognition of others, that we are responsible to each other. Failure here is not an end—it is a space that opens up after an idea or an experience has exhausted itself, after balloons deflate and the smoke clears. In this space, together, we hover in not knowing and struggling to listen.
For more information from the artists and curators, visit www.failingtolevitate.net.
EVENTS
Friday, June 6th, 6:00PM
Simultaneous Presence: Performances by Bill Dietz & Jen Rosenblit
Sunday, June 15th, 12:00PM
Anhoek School presents WMYN 87.9 FM Coffeehouse
Thursday, June 19th, 6:00PM
Failing to Levitate Public Reception
Wednesday, June 25th, 7:00PM
Heather Love and Jen Rosenblit
Friday, June 27th, 7:00PM
Do I (Even) Know What I'm Doing? discussion and A Pattern video screening
Tuesday, July 1st, 7:00PM
others will surely follow | Caterpillar: Performances by Danyel Ferrari & Rachel Higgins, and Glendalys Medina
Image courtesy of Kerry Downey and Natasha Marie Llorens
