letmypeopleshow:

Self-Portrait as a Self-Destructing Chocolate Head

Many of us attending the opening of the New Museum’s “NYC 1993” saw visions of our former selves back in the day, but no one had more selves there than Janine Antoni.

On the second floor, on a row of high plinths, are 14 Antoni heads. These are her famous self-portraits, Lick and Lather, casts made in chocolate and soap that were modeled on classical busts and “re-sculpted” by the processes described in the title.

Standing nearby, Antoni enjoyed watching visitors walk up close to the heads, and smell them.

“There’s not a lot of time between smelling and biting,” concedes the artist, whose heads have been attacked that way on several occasions. “It’s a funny thing when you make pieces about desire and people succumb to their desire.”

Antoni is happy to make replacement heads, which she does using FDA-approved latex molds: “Then I have to re-lick it, which is a bummer.” 

Read more at ARTnews.com

Detail of Janine Antoni’s Lick and Lather, 1993. 

COURTESY THE ARTIST AND LUHRING AUGUSTINE, NEW YORK.

On view through May 26!

Jeremy Bailey presents the newest installment for the First Look series titled “Famous New Media Art Patent Office,” in which he explores contemporary debates around patent law, bringing to light crucial issues affecting artists, entrepreneurs, and consumers alike.

An extension of previous projects, “Patent Office” reflects Bailey’s longstanding interest in combining new possibilities for self-representation with established forms of performance art.

View the artwork here.

Click here for more information on the New Museum’s First Look: New Art Online series.

The artist Julia Scher is known for her work with surveillance technologies. In 1993, Scher’s video installation Mothers Under Surveillance was included in the exhibition “The Final Frontier” at the New Museum. A simultaneous broadcast of the gallery space is mixed with prerecorded footage of elderly women being tracked while they attend “adult day care.” By including a date and time stamp, which functions as a sign for the “reality” of these images, the two streams of images merge into a single surveilled world. Scher creates an endless loop of people watching people while being watched themselves, with the aim of making visible the invisible systems of power and control enabled by electronic technology. Mothers Under Surveillance is on view in “NYC 1993: Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star” through May 26.  

reanimatorlab:

New Museum logo, made at IDEAS CITY

Thanks to everyone who participated in The Reanimator Lab’s hand-drawn animated GIF factory!

As part of a partnership with the New Museum’s Education Department, Elastic City is presenting Admission, a walk through “NYC 1993: Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star” by dance artist Michelle Boulé and theater director Niegel Smith. They will lead museum-goers on a playful sixty-minute walk-through and address codes of museum engagement. All are welcome at 1 p.m. on Friday May 24. Please sign up for tickets here (limited capacity).

Elastic City offers participatory walks by artists throughout and outside of New York. Rather than fact-based tours, the walks may rely on sensory-based techniques, the creation of new folk rituals, and/or other artist-derived exercises to explore one’s self, the group, and a given space.

Photo: Caitlin Ruttle

Mighty Morphin Power Rangers premiered in 1993. Now on view: “NYC 1993: Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star.”

(Source: powerrangersvintage)

Tony Kushner’s play Angels in America premiered in New York on May 4, 1993; it would later win a Pulitzer Prize. “NYC 1993: Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star” is now on view. 

(Source: chakayoh)

The 2013 IDEAS CITY Festival starts today! Follow @IDEASCITY on Twitter for updates, and visit ideas-city.org to plan your visit to the Conference, Workshops, StreetFest, and one hundred independent Projects throughout downtown NYC.

Rirkrit Tiravanija, Untitled (View),1992. Installation view: “The Big Nothing or Le Presque Rien.” Photo: Fred Scrutin

Where is art? Since the 1960s, many contemporary artists have made works that ask us to consider how institutions of art (such as museums, galleries, and magazines) are part of the artwork and make us see things in particular ways. In 1992, the New Museum organized an exhibition called “The Big Nothing or Le Presque Rien,” which explored the boundaries between art as object and museum as arbiter of display. Artists in the show included Janine Antoni, Devon Dikeou, Gary Simmons, and Rirkrit Tiravanija—all of whom have works on view at the New Museum as part of “NYC 1993: Experimental, Jet Set, Trash and No Star,” through May 26, 2013.

Earlier this month, Snarkitecture created Lift, a performance and installation for our Spring Gala. Architizer reports here.

Marlene McCarty and Laura Cottingham, “Objections,” 1993 (with Laurie Anderson, “Object, Objection, Objectivity,” 1973). Installation view: “In Transit,” 1993. Photo: Fred Scrutin

“Objections” was a collaboration between Laura Cottingham and Marlene McCarty for the 1993 New Museum exhibition “In Transit.” The work was conceived as three distinct parts: a pamphlet by the artists; three panels from Laurie Anderson’s 1973 series “Object, Objective, Objection”; and 12,500 matchbooks that were distributed from newsstands and coffee shops around New York City in 1993. In the pamphlet distributed during the exhibition, Cottingham and McCarty describe their mutual investment in a feminist critique of sexist social structures, including within the art world. They write, “The names called out against us haven’t changed in twenty years. We didn’t feel the need to make a new ‘art object’ because Anderson’s already exists—and it’s doubtful we, or anyone else, would ever get to see it if we didn’t ‘curate’ it here ourselves.” View more exhibition images from “In Transit” on our Digital Archive and read the entire pamphlet here.

Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park was released in 1993, setting a box office record of $47 million in ticket sales during the first weekend.

“NYC 1993: Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star” is on view through May 26!