Jakob Boeskov

May 2010

In January of 2010, Creative Time commissioned the artist Jakob Boeskov to direct a short video working within Nigeria’s thriving film industry, popularly known as Nollywood. Inspired by the democratized, DIY approach to cinema, Boeskov traveled to Lagos, Nigeria and collaborated with Nollywood film director Teco Benson to create the short, art–action video Dr. Cruel and the Afro-Icelandic Liberation Front. The resulting video collaboration is both manic and subtly rich, commenting on urgent political questions in an atmosphere of mayhem.

Jakob Boeskov’s Dr. Cruel is one of Creative Time’s new international initiatives. Beginning this year, the organization will work around the world, sending artists abroad to experiment with new models of making art in a global community. Creative Time’s work globally simply continues its commitment to experimenting with pressing ideas as they pertain to shifting conditions in the world we live in.

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Bestué-Vives

Times Square (Broadway between 44th and 45th Streets)
February 14, 2010

This February 14 in Times Square, Creative Time is proud to present Ralf and Jeanette, a one-time-only, outdoor theatrical “action” written and directed by Spanish artists Bestue-Vives. Perfectly timed for Valentine’s Day, Ralf and Jeanette tells the entire story arc of a romantic relationship—all in about ten minutes.

The play, to be performed in the pedestrian area of Broadway between 44th and 45th Streets at noon, will involve two actors and depict the evolution of a romance compressed into the space of mere minutes. Over the course of this short time, the two characters will meet for the first time, fall in love, and break up.

Above the actors, on the digital billboard on the east side of Broadway (between 44th and 45th streets), the play’s dialogue will be projected in time with the action. Since the actors will be unamplified, and their lines will be barely audible above the cacophony of Times Square, the screen will be used to “subtitle” the actors: like a silent movie brought to life.

Through an intimate and fast-paced dialogue, the performance will reveal the array of emotions that occur throughout a romance. At the same time, it will reference the ‘temporal compression’ that we often experience in Times Square, the symbolic heart of the city and a place where its freneticism is almost palpable.

Video and photographic documentation of Ralf and Jeanette will be released on Creative Time’s website following the performance.

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P.S.1
January 2010

Creative Time’s Open Door is a platform for artists who work in the public sphere to engage in constructive dialogues about their work. Without question, artists working in this vein of aesthetic practice face unique challenges with few forums existing to address them. Open Door was founded in 2003 in the belief that art production is not simply a final product, but a process dependent on critical input, working through pragmatic constraints, and developing a growing artistic community. Artists based in New York City who are seeking conceptual and practical guidance for taking the next steps to realize a specific project and move their practice forward are invited to apply for 20-minute, individual portfolio review sessions with members of our curatorial team.

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Pae White

Art Basel Miami
November 2009

For the 2009 premiere of the Self Roaming, Pae White will create an immersive and interactive cityscape that will provide a new experience with each visit. By day, large color blocks will dominate the landscape. At night, these colors blocks transform into a shadowy group of buildings.In addition to this labyrinth-like metropolis on the sand, White will design an open-air theater space that will host the Art Video, Art Film, and Art Perform programs and Art Basel Conversation.

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The Ace Hotel
November 18, 2009

Launching Limited Edition Pajamas by Will Cotton, produced by Exquisite Apparel in association with Phillips-Van Heusen.

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Glenn Kaino

The Slipper Room
November 9, 2009

Creative Time is pleased to present a blend of performance art and magic as part of Performa09. In Honor Among Thieves (Chapter 1: The Tower and the Star), Los Angeles–based artist Glenn Kaino will collaborate with renowned magician Ryan Majestic in a stage show that is part performance art and part magic. The show will challenge basic perceptions of reality, calling into question the relationship between a performer and his audience, and reality and illusion.

The Tower is the sixteenth Major Arcana card in the traditional Tarot deck and often represents situations of monumental ruin, catastrophe, and epic change. The Star, the seventeenth Major Arcana, represents tranquility or hope. Kaino and Majestic use these metaphors as departure points for a spectacular magic performance. The show will begin by evoking the experience of wonder at first seeing a magic trick performed. Then, slowly, through the performance art technique of repetition, the audience will become a part of the magician’s process of rehearsal and refinement, witnessing how the magician engages audience members in different ways. Before the audience, the trick moves from one of illusion to one of technique. Magicians, much like artists, make changes to one’s basic understanding of reality. Honor Among Thieves is an attempt, says Kaino, “to learn to believe and not believe at the same time.” It is the first of many ongoing experiments with art and magic that the artist will make as an interrogation of the social contract and a restructuring of systems of validation and meaning.

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Ayreen Anastas, Julieta Aranda, Edgar Arceneaux, Baltimore Development Cooperative (represented by Scott Berzofsky, Dane Nester & Nicholas Wisniewski), Yael Bartana, Bik Van der Pol, Reverend Billy, Tania Bruguera, Carolina Caycedo, Mel Chin, Teddy Cruz, Minerva Cuevas, Morris Dickstein, Okwui Enwezor, Peter Fend, Harrell Fletcher, Rene Gabri, Andrea Geyer, Liam Gillick, Dara Greenwald, Igor Grubic, Sharon Hayes, Thomas Hirschhorn, Alfredo Jaar, Carin Kuoni, Suzanne Lacy, Lars Bang Larsen, Maria Lind, Rick Lowe, Eve S. Mosher, Multiplicity (represented by Francisca Insulza), Vik Muniz, Kristina Norman, Not An Alternative (represented by Beka Economopoulos & Jason Jones), Reverend Billy, Laurie Jo Reynolds, Damon Rich, Gregory Sholette, David Levi Strauss, Temporary Services (represented by Marc Fisher), and What, How and for Whom.

Celeste Bartos Forum of The New York Public Library
October 23 - 24, 2009

Creative Time is pleased to announce a thrilling addition to the LIVE from the NYPL fall season—The Creative Time Summit: Revolutions in Public Practice. Over 35 international artists, curators, critics, scholars, anarchists, and activists will give concise presentations on their work and urgent issues of social justice in this rollercoaster conference, which takes place in the course of a single day. The Summit will open with the bestowal of The Leonore Annenberg Prize for Art and Social Change on The Yes Men.

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Edgar Arceneaux, AA Bronson and Peter Hobbs, The Bruce High Quality Foundation, Adam Chodzko, Tue Greenfort, Jill Magid, Teresa Margolles, Anthony McCall, Nils Norman, Susan Philipsz, Patti Smith and Jesse Smith, Tercerunquinto, Tris Vonna-Michell, Mark Wallinger, Klaus Weber, Lawrence Weiner, Judi Werthein, Guido van der Werve, and Krzysztof Wodiczko. Curated by Mark Beasley, with the support of Curatorial Assistant Shane Brennan.

Governors Island
June 27 - September 20, 2009

PLOT is a new public art quadrennial, produced and presented by Creative Time. This World & Nearer Ones is the first edition of PLOT, and will be held this summer on Governors Island. 19 artworks by international contemporary artists will be presented. The exhibition is free and open to the public Friday-Sunday.

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Creative Time Benefit 2010
Honoring Andrea and Marc Glimcher

Jing Fong
May 19, 2010

This year, Creative Time honored Andrea and Marc Glimcher, the forces behind The Pace Gallery, who share Creative Time’s passion for supporting innovative art, artists, and inspirational art experiences.

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Creative Time Benefit 2009
Honoring Creative Visionaries Melva Bucksbaum and Raymond Learsy

The 69th Regiment Armory
May 6, 2009

On May 6, 2009, Creative Time honored Melva Bucksbaum and Raymond Learsy with a night of chance to benefit Creative Time’s unparalleled support of ambitious projects that reach millions. The evening included bingo, a lucky draw, dinner, live and silent auctions featuring works by top contemporary artists, and a surprise performance of “Luck Be A Lady” by the honorees.

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Jeremy Deller

February - April, 2009

Over a six-week period at the New Museum in New York, (February 11–March 22, 2009) British artist Jeremy Deller has invited journalists, Iraqi refugees, soldiers, and scholars to share their memories of the last decade in and out of Iraq. In one-on-one conversations with New Museum visitors, their stories will elucidate the present circumstances in Iraq from many points of view. At the end of March, “It Is What It Is: Conversations About Iraq” will travel across the country from New York to California, with conversations conducted at more than ten public sites along the way. Sergeant Jonathan Harvey, an American veteran of the Iraq War, Esam Pasha, an Iraqi citizen, and Deller will be aboard a specially outfitted RV, along with Nato Thompson, Creative Time Curator, who will document the journey. Expanded versions of “It Is What It Is” will take place at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, in April and May of 2009, and at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, in October and November of 2009.

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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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