Exhibitions
and Lecture
Department of Art and Museum of Art,
College of Fine Arts, Ball State University
Funded by Lilly Endowment, Inc. and The Center for Media Design at Ball State University
Hans Breder. Cubes on a Striped Surface. 1964
INTERMEDIA ARTIST,
RENOWNED ART CRITIC COMING TO BALL STATE
MUNCIE, Ind. – Lilly Endowment Inc. and Ball State University’s
Center for Media Design (CMD) are bringing intermedia artist Hans Breder and
art critic and poet Donald Kuspit to campus.
During their visit, a series of exhibitions, receptions and a lecture will take
place at the Ball State University Museum of Art and the Art and Journalism
Building’s Atrium Gallery.
Kuspit will give a lecture, “Revisiting the Spiritual in Art,”
in the museum’s Recital Hall at 5:30 p.m. Jan. 21. A reception will follow
in the Sculpture Court for the exhibition and lecture.
"Hans Breder: Intermedia Works 1964-2003” will be on display in the
Atrium Gallery Jan. 15-30. A reception will take place at 4 p.m.- 6 p.m. Jan.
22.
"Hans Breder: Enacting the Liminal” can be viewed in the museum’s
Special Exhibition Galleries from Jan. 15 through March 7. Reception on Jan.
21 following the Kuspit lecture.
Hans Breder
will give an artist talk Friday, January 23rd in the Art and Journalism Building,
AJ175, at 3:30p.m.
Kuspit, an internationally renowned art critic and poet, will also be collaborating
with Breder and Ball State art professor John Fillwalk on a DVD artwork incorporating
Kuspit’s poetry that will premiere March 1 in the museum.
Breder experiments with many forms of art including painting, sculpture, drawing,
installation art, performance art, photography and electro-acoustic technologies.
His exhibition will consist of one large Plexiglas sculpture and several smaller
sculptures, paintings, drawings, video and digital photographs. The show was
organized by the University of Iowa Museum of Art and was shown there in 2002;
it is meant to complement his exhibition in the Atrium Gallery.
Breder has exhibited work in three Whitney Museum of American Art Biennials,
the Museum of Modern Art in New York and in many museums and galleries around
the world.
In all of his works, Breder is chiefly concerned with the “liminal,”
from the Latin word “limen,” which means threshold. Liminal describes
a transcendent reality or altered state of consciousness, and he uses his art
to evoke this in his viewers.
“He believes that this experience can transform the viewer’s perception
of the world,” said Fillwalk. “Breder also holds that the viewer’s
interaction with his work is essential to the completion of its meaning.”
Kuspit, professor of art history and philosophy at the State University of New
York at Stony Brook, writes for several journals including Art Criticism, Artforum,
New Art Examiner, and Sculpture and Centennial Review. He has written numerous
articles and more than 20 books and is well known for his work on the current
movement of neo-expressionism.
The visit is co-sponsored by the CMD and has been made possible through the
“Building the Four-Year Commitment” grant from Lilly Endowment Inc.
The $3.5 million grant will be used to help students make a stronger commitment
to stay in school and graduate.
Bringing high-profile, internationally renowned artists to campus serves as
a recruitment and retention tool in establishing the art department as a vibrant
institution, Fillwalk said.
(NOTE TO EDITORS: For more information, contact Fillwalk at jfillwalk@bsu.edu
or (765) 285-2642. For more stories visit the Ball State University News Center
at www.bsu.edu/news.)
Kelly Hacker
1/7/04
Hans Breder
The Intermedia Program in the School of Art and Art History at the University
of Iowa was created by Hans Breder in 1968 and directed by him until 2000. From
its inception, the Intermedia Program coalesced around several concepts. But
to understand the program, the first of its kind to grant the MFA, one must
understand Breder as “auteur.”
Breder, trained as a painter in Hamburg, Germany found early success in New York City with his constructivist aligned sculptures. Lured to The University of Iowa’s School of Art and Art History in 1966, Breder first conceived of the Intermedia Program as an arena in which he and his students could explore, in theory and in practice, the liminal spaces between the arts: art, music, film, dance, theater, poetry. Aware that he was making art in an intellectual environment, Breder in the second and third decade of the Intermedia Program extended his collaborative reach to the liberal arts: comparative literature, anthropology, psychology, communication studies. The exploration of liminal space and a collaborative approach to aesthetic theory and practice were essential to Breder’s conception of Intermedia, efforts to utilize the diverse artistic and intellectual community in Iowa City. Also key to his notion of Intermedia was the recognition that to develop the experimental arts in an entirely rural environment, an active visiting artists program was necessary. One of Breder’s first visiting artist was Robert Wilson, who developed Deafman Glance in Iowa City in 1970. Breder’s European sensibility ensured an internationalist perspective both in the visiting artist program and the curriculum in general.
For over three decades, the Intermedia Program at The University of Iowa offered courses which explored liminal spaces, boundaries between artistic and scholarly practices, between media, between genres, between social and political universes, between viewer and artist. During this time, students of the program interacted with a diverse roster of visiting artists, and traveled with Breder to Mexico, Italy, The Netherlands, Germany, creating time-based works—performances, rituals, events, site-specific installations, etc., a dynamic environment in which process was always emphasized over product.
Over the last thirty years Breder has worked with distinction in and between a number of media: painting, sculpture, photography, performance, video and electro-acoustic media: his media work, for example, was included in the Whitney Biennials in 1987,1989, and 1991; " '68 - Kunst und Kultur," Bauhaus Dessau, Dessau, Germany; The First Group Exhibition of American Art in Moscow, 1989; The 3rd Fukui International Video Biennale, Japan, 1989; 2nd Videonale, Bonn, Germany, 1986; International Architecture Exhibition, Technische Universität, Berlin, Germany, 1884; The Kitchen, Center for Video And Music, New York, New York,1975; "Kineticism: System Sculpture in Environmental Situations" (Cultural Olympiad), Museo Universitario de Ciencias y Arte, Mexico City, 1968; Collections include Cleveland Museum, Cleveland, Ohio; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Graden, Washington, D.C.; The Museum of Modern Art, New York, New York; The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, New York. His work is represented by the Mitchell Algus, New York and Hachmeister Gallerie, Muenster, Germany
Donald Kuspit
"Don Kuspit is one of the best known and most highly regarded critics in the world," said Victor Kord, Cornell art professor. He said Kuspit is particularly known for his work on the currently popular movement of neo-expressionism, which was inspired by the emotionally charged German expressionism of the 1920s and 1930s.
In developing his theories, Kuspit has borrowed heavily from the fields of philosophy and psychoanalysis. He holds a bachelor's degree in philosophy from Columbia University, as well as master's and doctoral degrees in philosophy from Yale University and the University of Frankfurt in Germany, respectively, and master's and doctoral degrees in art history from Penn State University and the University of Michigan, respectively.
Donald Kuspit, professor of art history and philosophy at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, lends his editorial expertise to several journals, including Art Criticism, Artforum, New Art Examiner, Sculpture and Centennial Review.
Kuspit also has been trained at the Psychoanalytic Institute of the New York University Medical Center and has been a clinical lecturer in psychiatry there.
Kuspit has received a Fulbright Lectureship in Philosophy and American Studies, a Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship, Lifetime Achievement Award for Distinguished Contribution to Visual Arts from the National Association of Schools of Art and Design, National Endowment for the Humanities and National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, Ford Foundation Fellowship, recipient of the College Art Association's prestigious Frank Jewett Mather Award for Distinction in Art Criticism and, most recently, an honorary doctorate from the San Francisco Institute of Art.
An author of numerous
articles, exhibition reviews, and catalog essays, Kuspit has written more than
twenty books, including Redeeming Art: Critical Reveries, Daniel Brush, Joseph
Raffael, Chihuly. His latest book, co-authored by Lynn Gamwell and just published
by Cornell University Press, is Health and Happiness in Twentieth-Century Avant-Garde
Art; about to be published is another work, Idiosyncratic Identities: Artists
at the End of the Avant-Garde. He lives in New York City.
Hans
Breder
Video Program in Atrium Gallery, AJ Building
Program
1 Viewing dates: January 15, 20, 24, 29
A Mother and Daughter, 1983
Video. Color. 8 min.
My TV Dictionary: The Drill, 1987
Video. Color. 5 min.
The Scream
or My Body Sees You, 1992
Video. Color. 6 min.
_________________________________________________________
Program 2 Viewing dates: January 16, 21, 25, 30
Under a Malicious Sky, 1988
Video. Color, 6 min.
From Here and There Too: Moscow Postcards, 1989/1990
Video. Color, 28 min 30 sec.
_________________________________________________________
Program 3 Viewing dates: January 17, 22, 27
Ursonate 86, 1986
Video. Color. 29 min 30 sec.
_________________________________________________________
Program 4 Viewing dates: January 18, 23, 28
Mass in A-Minor for Suitcases, 2000
Video document of performance. Color,
St. Petri Kirche. Dortmund, Germany. 54 min.
__________________________________________
Donald Kuspit Links
Stony
Brook University Philosophy Department
Hans Breder Links
Intermedia and Video Art Program at University of Iowa