The Competent Sleep
an 8-hour long inaction by
LUCIO POZZI

10 - 12 AM
Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery
526 West 26th St.

12 - 2 PM
Marvelli Gallery
526 West 26th St.

2 - 4 PM
Esso Gallery
525 West 26th St.

4 - 6 PM
White Box
525 West 26th St.
April 24, 2008
White Box 4-6 pm

Thursday April 24th, Lucio Pozzi, conceptual artist and painter, brings The Competent Sleep to Chelsea, marking a new addition to the tradition of sleep art, as it has progressed from fairy tales to Andy Warhol and beyond.  The 8 hour "inaction" will take place in 2 hour segments at the Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery, Marvelli Gallery, Esso Gallery, and White Box.

Another in a series of Pozzi's 8-hour long events, which began in the early seventies, The Competent Sleep explores the relationship between time, space, and sleep. With a foldable cot, pillow, a 1960's US army-issue woolen blanket, and an alarm clock, Pozzi will enter the host premises as The Sleeper. Without looking at the art on exhibition he will set up his cot, set an alarm, and go to sleep.

The action is ambiguous in nature- sleep signifies transcendent perception, yet it also hints at withdrawal. The action can be interpreted as a ritualistic gesture, an act of passive resistance or even as most basic melancholy. The props utilized, such as the foldable cot, reference camping, emergency evoke the experience of a homeless shelter– the nomadic states often symbolically associated with the flexible and revisable practice of contemporary art.

The action is focused yet transient. Because the event takes place sequentially in several locations, it implies visitation but rather than engaging with conversation, the performance is silent. Its apparent meaninglessness implies both a contemplative approach and a sense of detachment. Yet by taking place in a gallery environment, the performance becomes an artistic transaction.

ARTHAUS, The Unfair ‘07
December 4-10, 2007

Artistic Directors:
Juan Puntes
Ethan Cohen

Curators:
Renee Vara
Eric Shiner
Blanca de la Torre
Yulia Tikhonova
Raul Zamudio
Louky Keijsers

View Photos of Exhibition Here!

 
ArtHaus, by naming itself The Unfair 07 and showcasing an exciting range of U.S. and world-renowned mid-career and emerging contemporary artists, offered collectors and curators a welcome respite amidst the frenzied and unwieldy amount of fairs, parties and events. By contrast ArtHaus provided a truly alternative and intimate setting for art aficionados wrangling with the ‘unfairness’ of this year’s 23 art fairs, all spinning their wheels in conjunction with ArtBasel the prime Miami Art Fair.

 
From downstairs to upstairs, the sprawling spaces at ArtHaus contained works ranging from Oppenheim, Christoph Draeger, AES+F, Kallima, Cui Fei, Tokyoko, Tania Candiani to Eugenio Ampudia’s video installation. It offered art buyers a diverse and tempting collecting paradise. Ampudia’s installation, in a room by itself, quickly became one of the surprise discoveries around town.

 
Throughout all the rooms and gardens of ArtHaus including kitchen and bathrooms, a great many more discoveries awaited the adventuresome visitor. The selection was handpicked by a distinguished group of curators from various different cultural perspectives and backgrounds making for a fascinating mix of aesthetics and values. ,


After entering the arched gate of the large old deco mansion, ArtHaus presented the best cutting-edge works around today and by keeping its doors open till 10:00pm ArtHaus’ visitors had the opportunity to kick-off their shoes and enjoy a relaxed atmosphere – a sense of how to live with contemporary art – thereby transforming art collecting into a relaxed, memorable and personal experience.

An initiative of Ethan Cohen Projects and artincubator.org, ArtHaus will donate part of its proceeds to White Box’s 2008 Annual Exhibition Budget.

We Are Your Future
March 2 - 28, 2007

Special project of the 2nd Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art Curated by Ethan Cohen and Juan Puntes @ the Winzavod Center of Contemporary Art 4th Syromyatnichesky Pereulok, 1, Moscow, Russia.

View photos of We Are Your Future

Events like these offer irrefutable proof that the cultural topography is shifting and the former New York -- Paris -- Berlin axis has been replaced by a new art world of a loose and far-reaching network of “centers”. Responding, We Are Your Future presented 50 works by artists who are the catalyst for this new landscape: 33 prominent artists from China and Latin America who with their peers have changed the dynamics of Mexico City , Beijing and Havana ’s art scenes. For many included in We Are Your Future redefining the art world boundaries meant violating its taboos and challenging its implicit value system. In 1994, Ai Weiwei, a leading figure in Chinese contemporary art, painted a Coca-Cola logo across the side of a 2,000-year-old Han dynasty pot; in 1998 he broke a rare blue-and-white porcelain dish with a hammer and then signed the hammer. Last year, Santiago Sierra, a Spanish expatriate living in Mexico City , caused controversy in Germany with his installation 245 Cubic Meters, which turned a former synagogue in Pulheim into a gas chamber. These artists do not pursue scandal for scandal's sake. For them, the complacency and hypocrisy of Western consumerist society unwilling to confront its problems are the biggest scandal of all. For their Moscow debut, several of the artists in We Are Your Future created works tailored to the Russian context. Wang Guangyi, known for inserting corporate logos into the iconography of Chinese Socialist Realism, presented Peace and War, an installation where propaganda posters from the 1969 Sino-Soviet border conflict hang along a 50-meter trench. Marcos Ramirez ERRE painted a road billboard indicating the physical and temporal distance from Moscow to cities invaded by Soviet and Russian armies, from Berlin to Grozny . Cuban artist Tania Bruguera asked a retired KGB officer to set up office in an abandoned corner and conduct workshops for viewers with trust issues. We Are Your Future was a forum for artists to open a critical dialogue with Russia, a nation much like their own is tagged as a "developing economy" and "art world periphery" yet has closer ties to the cultural and political history of Europe. We Are Your Future was presented in the 1,800 square meters two-building Winzavod new contemporary arts center in a partly renovated 19th-century winery houses two exhibition halls for Moscow’s high profile galleries, design and artists’ studios, the largest photography studio, bars, cafes, bookshops and record stores making the Winzavod the center of Moscow's finest creative resources

For more information visit: www.artnet.com a sponsor of the exhibition, with Art Asia Pacific, Art Chronika, ArtZine.com,Winzavod Center for Contemporary Arts, and Martin C. Liu and Associates. This exhibition is co-produced by ArtIncubator.org and Out of the Box, a division of White Box. Art Incubator is a new non-profit organization with the goal to be a catalyst for artistic and cultural exchange between emerging and established artists from China and the United States.

Political Pornographies at DiVA Miami
December 9, 2006
An evening of digital video shown at DiVA Miami.
Curated by Juan Puntes

Artists: Raffaella Crispino / Damir Niksic / Robert Boyd / Christoph Draeger / Mary Mattingly / Momoyo Torimitsu / Martin Durazo / Zhou Xiaohu

View photos of Political Pornographies

---

Dennis Adams / A.E.S. / Assume Vivid Astro Focus / Robert Boyd / Conrad Atkinson / Christoph Draeger / El Perro / Rainer Ganahl / Kyle Goen / Maximo Gonzalez / Patrick Hamilton / Alfredo Jaar / Alexei Kallima / Larry Litt / Marcos Lopez / Mary Mattingly / Muntadas / Dread Scott / Seric Shoba / S & P Stanikas / Javier Tellez / Zhou Xiaohu

View photos of (212)-911


(212)-911 is a group exhibition camouflaged as an installation. It uses as curatorial foil Manhattan’s area code referenced in New York ’s most recent art fair contender that is organized under the rubric of Art (212). While art fairs proliferate and we enjoy their offerings such as a still-life painting, a sepia-tone landscape photograph, or a meticulously rendered sculptural portrait, the myriad social and political crises both in the U.S. and abroad continue unabated and demand the utmost immediate attention from the world at large. This state of emergency has motivated White Box’s contribution to Art (212) as an urban S.O.S.: 911. The works in (212)-911 convey this immediacy in a plethora of formal and thematic ways and have been selected from White Box’s history and its pivotal role as a progressive and critical art institution in the New York art world. To paraphrase Andre Bretons’s metaphor of Frida Kahlo’s painting, (212)-911 is a “bomb with ribbon tied around it.”

Russia 2, Bad News from Russia
– A Special Project:
Action-Half Drawings and C-Prints
December 8, 2005 thru January 11, 2006
A Collaboration with Magnan-Emrich Gallery, Chelsea. By AES+F Group

View photos of Russia 2, Bad News from Russia


The group that makes up AES+F consists of four Russian-born artists: Tatiana Arzamasova, Lev Evzovich, Evgeny Svyatsky, and Vladimir Fridkes. Working in collaboration, the four create a concept, discuss the story they want to illuminate and decide the best way to proceed. This could involve photography, video, installation, mixed media works or a combination of all of the above. The subjects they incorporate come from advertising, models and pop stars, kids that have started their careers at a very early age, losing those precious years of innocence and wonder. Many times, the archetypal images of American & European Heroism or the Media serve as the backdrop. A fine and ironic mix and combine of Social Realism and Historical European Portraiture genres, their style if irrefutably their own.

---

The public art series created by Solange Fabião traveled an unusual journey around the world. Its mission: to bring a little bit of the US to Lebanon, a glimpse of China to New York
and again a taste of Brazil to China.
In an unexpected dialogue of contrasts and connections, uniting ten different cities across the planet.

After Ms. Fabião’s videos of New York and Shanghai were projected onto the façade of the Beirut, Lebanon Dome, 2004, her next stop was a building on the corner of a major thruway, with high-density traffic linking New Jersey and Long Island via Canal Street, which is also the entrance to Chinatown New York. This strategic location afforded drivers and passengers and street traffic with easy access to images of streets in Nanning and Shanghai (in 2005). During 2006 Transitio continues its journey to Beijing, Rio de Janeiro and Los Angeles, followed by Milan and Osaka in 2007.

Presentation of the C.E.N.D.E.A.C.from Murcia, Spain
September 30, 2005, 6-8pm @ The Carriage House Center for the Arts of the Gabarron Foundation

A one-evening presentation and discussion by curators Pedro A. Cruz, Miguel A. Hernández-Navarro on the obstacles and advantages of alternative academic curriculum in provincial university settings.

In conjunction with Peripheries of the Body

Poles Apart / Poles Together
June 12 – November 16, 2005
2005 Venice Biennale
Curated by Juan Puntes and Doron Polak

View photos of Poles Apart / Poles Together

Poles Apart / Poles Together stems from an idea which the Venetian poet, John Gian, the Israeli curator Doron Polak, and the Spanish-born, New York-based curator Juan Puntes have derived from the Biennale’s central message and meaning: that creativity and the artist are individual, but that art is communal and unifying. The Biennale has always reflected how the individuality of the artist is unified with the world of art and the larger community. Similarly, Poles Apart / Poles Together seeks to unite a large number of artists’ individual works into a communal project through a local theme with international resonance. One hundred well-known international artists will employ one of the traditional features of Venice to explore the present moment and its creative possibilities. By relating the conventional to the creative, they will demonstrate how the traditional and commonplace can foster innovative approaches to art-making. The project converts the mooring poles (pilings) throughout Venice’s waterways – plain and weathered sticks of wood – into single or clustered blossoms on the water by sheathing them in images and textures. Groups of up to fifty poles will be developed thematically by individual artists, but the project in its totality will involve the cumulative creative work of an entire army of artists, representing a dynamic, publicly accessible, and aesthetically exciting addition to the Biennale.

Art Performance + Catalogue Launch
with a Critical Panel Discussion
June 23, 2005 6- 9pm

by Fernando Castro Florez, Paco Cao, Eleanor Heartney and
Raul Zamudio @ The Cervantes Institute, New York

In conjunction with Posthumous Choreographies & Other Optical Labyrinths

Status: Stolen
June 13 - July 13, 2005
by Perry Bard

Mobile truckside billboard featuring five Mesopotamian artifacts either destroyed or stolen from the Baghdad Museum since 2003. In transit on a New York City delivery truck from June 13-July 13, 2005. Made possible through a grant from the Puffin Foundation with support from White Box, NY.

View photos of Status Stolen

L’s Black Factory National Tour 2005:
June 4, 2005
All day Saturday in front of White Box
by William Pope

The Black Factory, artist William Pope.
L’s interactive performance art installation on wheels, opens for business at White Box on Saturday June 4, 2005 as part of its national tour from Maine to Missouri, playfully opening up a discussion on difference and democracy wherever it parks. The national tour includes stops at University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA, White Box Gallery, NYC,
Three Rivers Festival, Pittsburgh, PA, Contemporary Art Museum St Louis, St Louis, MO, and Salina Art Center, Salina, KS.

View photos of The Black Factory at White Box

The Black Factory requires the participation of an audience to do its work. Typically the Factory arrives at a city or town and sets up its interactive workshop on the street. People bring objects that represent blackness to them. The Factory’s workers use these objects in tightly rehearsed but loosely performed skits to stimulate a conversation — a flow of ideas, images and experiences. Most objects are photographed and made part of the Factory’s virtual library, some are housed in the Factory’s archive for later use, and some are pulverized in the Factory’s workshop to make new products available in the Factory’s gift shop. The Factory also has a charitable side. The most direct expression is its “Twice-Sold” products also available in the gift shop. “Twice-sold” are products that are sold twice. Pope. L visits a local supermarket, buys canned goods, slaps on a Black Factory

gold label, signs and dates each one and makes them available for $250 and up! 100% of all proceeds are given directly to a local charitable organization. William Pope. L, artist and mastermind behind the Black Factory says “The Black Factory does not make blackness, it makes opportunity; the chance to imagine a future we’d like instead of one imposed on us. It is a conversation piece on wheels and a chance for folks to open up their hearts and minds, laugh and talk freely, maybe even disagree about what brings us together as well as what divides us.”

WBX@Winnebago – Art L.A.
January 27 – 30th, 2005
By Juan Puntes & Ethan Cohen

The motivation for this project was for White Box to participate in an Art Fair such as the Los Angeles Art Fair without having to rent and pay exorbitant space rental fees and other promotional costs by simply driving in and parking a Winnebago in the public parking lot to then utlize the RV as an oof-site exhibition space and promote a selection of provocative and non-commercial artworks by those artists willing to support White Box in its efforts to counter the marketplace and “art-as-business only” current prevailing dictum.

White House- Green House
August 25, 2004
By Karen Giusti

A mobile Public Art project targeting Voters Registration in Washington D.C.and New York. The work consisted of a White House replica simulating a Green House, done in a scale to fit on top of an open flat-bed truck.
Ms Giusti then drove the work to different strategic locations, and beginning in Washington, the Green House was parked offering the urban street traffic
with public access, enter, engage in
conversations and promote electoral awareness.

PEACE Billboard
June 26, 2003
By Jim Costanzo

A billboard project in a series of three,
the most recent “Peace”,
was placed in downtown Newark, NJ.

View photos of PEACE Billboard

For further information visit www.jimcostanzo.us

| BACK |

White Box is a 501 (c) (3) and all donations – charitable contributions are tax-deductible to the full extent of the law. Consult your accountant and financial advisor for applicable Federal and NY State Charitable Deduction rules.