Simon Grennan & Christopher Sperandio, Lauren Weinstein, Anton Kannemeyer, Packard Jennings, Jeffrey Brown, Emilia Edwards, Luba Lukova, James Pyman, Jim Torok, and more

Online-only
Ongoing
Image: Lauren Weinstein

Drawing upon comics’ long history of timely social and political critique—their vested interest in capturing and commenting on the zeitgeist—Creative Time Comics invites artists to produce new, online comics that address the issues facing our world. In the process, the works in this series smudge and redraw the lines between social inquiry, political engagement, and visual entertainment—taking on difficult subjects through the economical means of words and pictures in juxtaposition. As a starting point, each artist was given a blank grid of nine squares and asked to draw within or defy its borders. The finished works are featured for one month before being archived chronologically.

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AA Bronson and Peter Hobbs

New Orleans, LA
October 31, 2008

AA Bronson and Peter Hobbs’ Invocation of the Queer Spirits invokes historical queer and marginalized practices as a way to heal the past, critique the present, and project a more creative future.

Invocation of the Queer Spirits will at once “christen” the latest rebirth of New Orleans as a cultural capital while evoking the spirits of the marginalized populations that have played a formative role in shaping New Orleans’s culture. The event marks the site as a place of future creativity, while infusing it with a sense of the city’s ghostly past. In addition to the ritual invoking the spirits, the artists will make a vow concerning their lives (and creative lives in particular) for the coming year.

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Erick Beltrán, Center for Tactical Magic, Critical Art Ensemble and Institute for Applied Autonomy, Annabel Daou, dBfoundation, Matthew Diaz, Hasan Elahi, Feel Tank, Tanya Fields, Karen Finley, Luca Frei, Group Material, GuerillaGirlsBroadBand, David Harvey, John Hawke (with Sancho Silva), Sharon Hayes, Brian Holmes, Elizabeth Holtzman, Kenneth Tin-Kin Hung, Index of the Disappeared (Chitra Ganesh + Mariam Ghani), InCUBATE, Magdalena Jitrik, Matt Keegan, Jon Kessler, Olga Koumoundouros + Rodney McMillian, Steve Kurtz, Steve Lambert, Ligorano/Reese, Pia Lindman, Rachel Mason, Camilo Mejía, Carlos Motta, Angel Nevarez + Valerie Tevere, Trevor Paglen, Cornelia Parker, Jenny Polak, Steve Powers, Greta Pratt, Paul Ramírez Jonas, Red76, Reverend Billy, Duke Riley, Martha Rosler, Dread Scott, Allison Smith, Chris Sollars, Chris Stain, Mark Tribe, United Victorian Workers, WAGE, the Yes Men, Chu Yun, and more

Austin, TX; Oakland, CA; Los Angeles, CA; St. Paul, MN; Denver, CO; Coney Island, NYC; and the Park Avenue Armory, NYC
Summer and Fall 2008
Photo: Meghan McInnis

After traveling across the country to glean perspectives from artists and activists on the state of democracy, and commissioning 4 projects in 6 cities nationally, Creative Time’s year-long program Democracy in America: The National Campaign culminated in the “Convergence Center”: a major exhibition, participatory project space, and meeting hall mounted in New York City’s Park Avenue Armory. The Convergence Center at Park Avenue Armory provided an activated space to reflect on and perform democracy, and was punctuated by speeches by leading political thinkers as well as community leaders and activists throughout the run of its program.

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David Byrne

Battery Maritime Building, 10 South Street
May 31–August 10, 2008
Photo: Justin Ouellette

A 9,000-square-foot, interactive, site-specific installation by renowned artist David Byrne. The artist transformed the interior of the landmark Battery Maritime Building in Lower Manhattan into a massive sound sculpture that all visitors were invited to sit and “play.” The project consisted of a retrofitted antique organ, placed in the center of the building’s cavernous second-floor gallery, that controlled a series of devices attached to its structural features—metal beams, plumbing, electrical conduits, and heating and water pipes. These machines vibrated, struck, and blew across the building’s elements, triggering unique harmonics and producing finely tuned sounds.

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Matt Calderwood, Mika Rottenberg, Guido van der Werve, Gilbert & George, Mark Tribe, and Malcolm McLaren

Broadway between 44th and 45th Streets
Ongoing
Photo: Meghan McInnis

Creative Time’s ongoing presentation of video art At 44 1/2: MTV’s outdoor, gilded, HD screen located in the heart of New York City’s Times Square, with a rotating schedule of artists and programs.

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Robert King Wilkerson & Rigo 23, Liam Gillick & Tirdad Zolghadr, Ryan Gander & Bedwyr Williams, Adam Pendleton, Frances Stark, Dexter Sinister, Mark Leckey, Ian Svenonius, No Bra, Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, Chris Evans, Carey Young, Rammelzee, and Vert

April 30, and May 3, 4, 9, 21, and 22, 2008
Citywide
Photo: Sam Horine

A series of events and lectures throughout New York City that expressed the infinite shades of the voice. Hey Hey Glossolalia was comprised of events that combine sound, image, performance, and writing to investigate the peripheries of speech, the charged relationship between speaker and audience, and how the artist (and curator) can speak with and through the voice of others. No eardrum was left unchallenged as this international group used their throats to entice, enervate, educate, and explore.

“Hey Hey Glossolalia” derives from two terms in spoken language: “hey hey,” an exclamation and call for attention, and “glossolalia,” an evangelical term meaning “speaking in tongues”—utterances that resemble speech but are unintelligible. The title was inspired by Dadaist abstraction of language and the seemingly meaningless but often repeated beat marker in popular music.

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Creative Time’s 2008 Gala Benefit
Honoring Jet Setter Beth Rudin DeWoody on Her Birthday

April 23, 2008
Gustavino’s
Photo: Neil Rasmus

In 2008, Creative Time honored Beth Rudin DeWoody, a rare visionary who believes in the value of experimentation, the saliency of artists’ ideas, and the transformative potential of art. The gala featured a silent auction, live auction, performance by Beth, and a surprise appearance by Hunkmania.

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Malcolm McLaren, David Byrne, Matthew Buckingham, Sharon Hayes, Mark Tribe, Susanne Oberbeck, Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, and Mika Rottenberg

Online-only
April 2008

A series of artist dialogues commissioned by Creative Time. With a nod to The Exquisite Corpse, the artists engaged in a volley of two to three e-mail correspondences with each of two other artists we matched them with. Each artist instigated one conversation and was on the receiving end for the other. They were each provided with brief information on their partners’ recent work and upcoming projects with Creative Time, but were encouraged to talk about anything of interest—related or unrelated to their projects, and from the politically important to the scandalous. Some of the artists are participating in projects together or have known each other for years, and some had never met and investigated each other’s work for the first time.

The Exquisite Corpse is an 80-year-old game created by French Surrealists that evolved from a parlor game called Consequences. The first player writes down a word and folds the paper so his nosy neighbor can’t see what has been written. The second player adds a word to it, the third, another—each without seeing the texts written before his or her own. On the first round, the words are to be adjectives, on the second round, nouns, the third, verbs, and so on. Finally, the paper is unfolded and the sentences are read aloud. The game took its name from a favorite sentence created in this way by the Surrealists: “The exquisite corpse drinks the new wine.”

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Matthew Buckingham

March 28, 29,30, and April 4, 5, and 6, 2008
NYC Water Taxis
Photo: Matthew Buckingham

This 40-minute-long film screened aboard moving water taxis featured a single continuous shot from a helicopter as it traveled above the Hudson River. The film was accompanied by a narration by the artist meditating on the region’s turbulent history, asking the question, “What role does social memory play in defining the present moment?”

Muhheakantuck explored the social and political impact of the relatively brief but violent period of contact between Dutch colonists and the Lower Hudson River Valley’s indigenous Lenape people. By examining how maps are constructed, how places are named (and thereby owned), and what stories are left silent, the film exposes the consequences of Henry Hudson’s journey. Buckingham’s narrative reminded us that “The river that became known as the Hudson was not discovered—it was invented and re-invented.”

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Paul Chan

Co-produced by The Classical Theatre of Harlem with director Christopher McElroen, featuring New Orleans born actor Wendell Pierce, and in collaboration with New Orleans’ partners: University of New Orleans, Xavier University, Dillard University, NOCCA High School, Lusher High School, Frederic Douglass High School, John McDonough High School, Students at the Center, Neighborhood Story Project, The Porch, and Renaissance Project.

November 2, 3, 4, 9, and 10, 2007
Lower Ninth Ward and Gentilly, New Orleans
Photo: Donn Young

New Orleans is the setting for the 20th century’s most emblematic story of waiting. According to artist Paul Chan, “The longing for the new is a reminder of what is worth renewing. Seeing Godot embedded in the very fabric of the landscape of New Orleans was my way of re-imagining the empty roads, the debris, and, above all, the bleak silence as more than the expression of mere collapse. There is a terrible symmetry between the reality of New Orleans post-Katrina and the essence of this play, which expresses in stark eloquence the cruel and funny things people do while they wait: for help, for food, for tomorrow.”

Four free site-specific outdoor evening performances of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot took place over two weekends in November, 2007 in two New Orleans neighborhoods — the middle of an intersection in the Lower Ninth Ward, and the front yard of an abandoned house in Gentilly.

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Mike Nelson

September 8 – October 28, 2007
The Old Essex Street Market
117 Delancey @ Essex Street, Southeast Corner
Photo: Charlie Samuels

Mike Nelson transformed the disused interior of the Essex Street Market in NYC’s Lower East Side, taking audiences on an unexpected journey through reconstructed rooms, passageways, and meticulously assembled environments of his installation titled A Psychic Vacuum. Inspired by the building’s history, the surrounding neighborhood, literary and cultural references, and the current social climate in the United States, the project comes to life via materials gleaned from local salvage yards and debris from the market’s heyday. This site-specific project, the London-based artist’s first major installation in the U.S., offered audiences an opportunity to explore a forgotten building, once a bustling part of the Lower East Side, which has been inaccessible to the public for the past thirteen years.

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Mark Beasley, Ellen Harvey, Carlo McCormick, Stephen O’Malley, Anne Pasternak, Cynthia Rowley, Tom Sachs, John Waters, Linda Yablonsky, and others

May 5, 2007-ongoing
Citywide
Image credit: Charlie Samuels

Aptly borrowing its title from a New York Dolls album, One Day It Will Please Us To Remember Even This was a project that marked the thirty-third anniversary of Creative Time and consisted of plaques commemorating historical New York art projects or moments, chosen by a range of artists and writers who have made a mark on New York themselves. Appropriately, thirty-three locations were chosen, granting those sites the legacy and prestige that only a public plaque can denote. Each site was also prescribed a telephone number that, when dialed, offered a personal audio guide to the location by the artist who chose it, enabling listeners to imagine what it was like to be part of history in the making.

Spartacus Chetwynd, Hamish Fulton, Gelitin, Jonathan Monk, Adrian Piper, Javier Tellez

May 1-June 2, 2007
Manhattan and Coney Island
Image Courtesy Creative Time

An international group of performers and young artists took over New York City’s streets, Coney Island’s beach, and even the foreheads of hundreds of New Yorkers throughout May 2007. The exhibition featured projects by Adrian Piper, who initiated an open call for volunteers to imprint the text “Everything will be taken away” on their foreheads in henna for two weeks, while the four-man group Gelitin simply dug a giant hole in the beach on Coney Island for seven days. Jonathan Monk restaged a new version of Daniel Buren’s 1975 performance Seven Ballets In Manhattan; Hamish Fulton created a “walk”—his first in New York City; Javier Tellez organized a street protest with hundreds of wind-up toy robots carrying placards written by children and mental health patients; and Spartacus Chetwynd, with a team of four others from England, developed improvisational interventions responding to the architecture throughout New York City and Coney Island. Utilizing a range of media and humor, with a nod to legendary earth works and endurance projects of the 1970s, Six Actions for New York City effectively created provocative pedestrian projects that enlivened the city with an art practice that remains inherently experimental and challenging.

Eve Sussman and The Rufus Corporation

February 22-27, 2007
323 6th Avenue and West 3rd Street
Image: Eve Sussman

Creative Time presented the United State’s premiere of Eve Sussman and The Rufus Corporation’s video-musical The Rape of the Sabine Women as a free public screening for one week during the 2007 Armory Show. Developed largely through impovisation and filmed with a cast of hundreds, The Rape Of The Sabine Women was conceived as an allegory based loosely on the ancient myth that follows Romulus’ founding of Rome and inspired by Jacques-Louis David’s 1799 painting, Intervention of the Sabine Women. Re-envisioning the myth as a 1960’s period piece with the Romans cast as G-men, the Sabines as butchers’ daughters, and the heyday of Rome allegorically implied in an affluent international style summer house, Sussman’s version is a riff on the original story of abduction and intervention in which Romulus devises a plan to ensure the future of the empire. While the Roman myth traces the birth of a society, Sussman’s telling suggests the destruction of a utopia: the intervention of the women is fraught, and the chaos that ensues transforms the designed perfection into nothingness.

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Ugo Rondinone

February 1, 2006-April 30, 2007
The Ritz-Carlton, 2 West Street
Image Credit: Charlie Samuels

Fabricated in aluminum and coated in white enamel, Ugo Rondinone’s sculptures for the sixth Art on the Plaza were cast from trees found in the countryside outside Naples, the hometown of his parents. In accordance with Italian law, the trees, which still bear olives, were cast on site in rubber; in the foundry, wax gave way to a final aluminum cast. By introducing metallic casts of this ancient tree to Lower Manhattan’s modern metropolis, typically defined by manmade structures of glass and concrete, Rondinone furthered his investigation of themes of time and displacement and the relationship between natural and artificial environments. The white trees, each weighing a ton, complemented New York City’s winter landscape and established a discourse between the history-laden olive trees and their unusual urban context. Known for a literary vision that often extends to the titles of his works, Rondinone named the cast trees with his own short poems: air gets into everything even nothing and get up girl a sun is running the world.

This project was created in partnership with Millennium Partners and the Battery Park City Authority.

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Doug Aitken; Klaus Biesenbach and Peter Eleey, curators

January 16-February 12, 2007
The Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53rd Street
Image: Doug Aitken

Mirroring the pulsating rhythms and energies of the city, Doug Aitken’s sleepwalkers was a multiscreen cinematic art experience that integrated film projections with the architectural fabric of its environs. Noting that “the city is about communication,” Aitken responded by transforming the concrete, glass, and brick of The Museum of Modern Art’s façade into a fluid mesh of interlacing narratives. While the films suggested an inner life of the buildings, they also reclaimed modern architecture for personal expression and imbued anonymity with fluid human presence.

The film itself depicted the nocturnal journeys of five characters representing city dwellers—a bicycle messenger, an electrician, a postal worker, a businessman, and an office worker. As they moved from the solitude of their personal and professional lives into the chaotic and rich interrelationships of their urban existences, the characters’ individual narratives were juxtaposed on different surfaces of the Museum’s exterior, with moments of parallel synchronicity in their movements emphasizing both the solitude of their lives as well as their membership in the same urban community.

In collaboration with MoMA, the project was the artist’s first large-scale public artwork in the United States and was the first to bring art to the newly renovated museum’s exterior walls.

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Haluk Akakçe

November 3-30, 2006
Viva Vision screen, Las Vegas
Image credit: David Lancaster

Following his first visit to Las Vegas, Turkish artist Haluk Akakçe formed an impression of the infamous city as a kind of electric painting emerging from the evening desert, a metaphor for his own work. Sky is the Limit became Akakçe’s interpretation of Las Vegas, modeled after his own experience there. Working on the Viva Vision canopy screen—the largest video screen in the world—Akakçe built an electronic sky, a virtual universe in which raindrops seem to land from above, sending ripples throughout the rendered skyscape. For Akakçe “the canopy represent[ed] the limit of perception.” Appropriately, Sky is the Limit also referenced the seemingly unlimited promise that gambling holds out to us, the power to change our destiny, for better or for worse, in the pull of a slot machine lever or the roll of the dice. The work’s narrative crescendoed toward an ecstatic moment evocative of the euphoria of winning, but in fact retained much of the deliberate pacing of Akakçe’s recent pieces. Offering a space out of time in a parallel world, Sky is the Limit fit perfectly in the mirage that is Las Vegas.

This project was produced in partnership with the Las Vegas Arts Commission and Fremont Street Experience.

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Mel Chin, Coco Fusco, Jens Haaning, Michael Rakowitz

September-October, 2006
150 1st Avenue; 529 Atlantic Avenue, Brooklyn; and various locations throughout New York City
Image courtesy Creative Time

In addition to the provocative Who Cares dinner conversations and as part of Creative Time’s endeavor to investigate the contemporary dearth of socially-engaged art, four artists were commissioned to create public art projects which were presented in the Fall of 2006, a year after the dinners and around the time of the Who Cares book release. Political, acerbic, and witty, the projects included Mel Chin’s animated film comparing the histories of 9/11 in the United States, 2001, with 9/11 in Santiago, Chile, 1973, Coco Fusco’s multimedia performance about women’s role in the “War on Terror” (September 28-October 1, 150 1st Avenue), Michael Rakowitz’s temporarily reopened family import-export business from Brooklyn to Iraq (October 1-31, Atlantic Ave., Brooklyn), and Jens Haaning’s Arabic Joke, a traditional joke depicted on posters in Arabic and displayed throughout the city (various locations, October.)

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Hjalti Karlsson, Jan Wilker

September 4-September 10, 2006
Times Square, Madison Square Park, Chelsea, SoHo, Battery Park City, Coney Island
Image credit: Justin Ouellette

In search of an idea for the cover of Creative Time’s first major book celebrating thirty-three years of bringing art throughout New York City, the team of designers, Hjalti Karlsson and Jan Wilker of karlssonwilker inc., conceived of a means to generate a cover that would capture the essence of the organization: a site-specific public art project called The Urban Visual Recording Machine (UVRM).

The UVRM was a set of equipment housed in a truck reminiscent of a “pope mobile” with its large Plexiglas windows. The machines in the truck were programmed to record the colors, volume of sound and voices, and weather (wind speed and direction, temperature, and humidity) of each individual location the truck traveled to for that moment in time. The data was instantly transcribed into an abstract visual representation of the environment, with graphic shapes and patterns created by the designers and Show & Tell Production, and printed out on-site with the time and date. Every thirty seconds for five days the truck visited locations of signature Creative Time projects: Times Square, Chelsea, the East Village, Coney Island, The Art Parade in Soho, and Lower Manhattan. Five thousand book covers, each capturing a moment in New York City, were instantaneously printed on-site, effectively bringing together new technology with artistic vision as part of Creative Time: The Book.

Michael Bevilacqua, B-Girlz presented by Martha Cooper, Dazzle Dancers, E. V. Day, Pia Dehne, Adam Dugas, David Ellis, Fischerspooner with Gareth Pugh, Micah Ganske, Os Gemeos, J.V.A. Flag Corporation, Taylor McKimmons, Ted Mineo, Muffin Head and Amber Ray, Julie Atlas Muz, Ara Peterson, Michael Portnoy, Steve Powers, Cristina Lei Rodriguez, Robert Snead, Bec Stupak, Three As Four, Momoyo Torimitsu, Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black, and others

September 9, 2006
West Broadway between Houston and Grand streets
Image credit: Justin Ouellette

Following the success of the inaugural Art Parade 2005, Creative Time, Deitch Projects, and Paper magazine teamed up again to bring New York City spectators The Art Parade 2006: a sometimes chaotic but always entertaining procession of floats, placards, portable sculptures, kites, performances, and street spectacles created by over seventy-five artists, performers, and designers.

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