For Immediate Release:
Standard Sizes
Curated by João Ribas
June 14 ‚ July 12, 2008
The Andrew Kreps Gallery is pleased to present Standard Sizes, a group
exhibition curated by João Ribas.
Standard Sizes surveys a diverse group of artists over several generations
whose work resists the notion of art as the product of an expressive subject
- the radically individuated self largely equated with the figure of the artist.
In place of this vestige of Renaissance self-fashioning and the affectations
of Romanticism, the exhibition presents works that look to standards and formal
procedures to displace the idea of expressive subjectivity as the domain of
art.
If the figure of the visionary artist was once emblematic of the emancipatory
idea of the 'individual', in a society where it had not yet fully emerged, this
notion is deradicalized by the democratization of subjective expression today.
As a result of this abiding 'selfness,' it seems more pressing to understand
the structures and standards built into the parameters of ëexpressioní and the
production of meaning itself.
By foregrounding an effect, rather than the affect, of meaning,
Standard Sizes looks to practices that solicit content from standards
or procedural form, cede subjective control through generative systems, or that
elicit meaning from iteration, standardization, or repetition. Ranging from
work based on standard formats and materials, to the rhetorical use of tropes
such as the expressive brushstroke, the works in the exhibition looks to the
implicit, if now obscured, values and norms present in standardized form. This
is to evince how frames dictate content, how the values assimilated in standards
belie whose feet and fingers are measured to arrive at consensus, and to discover
meaning by way of slippages in the process of standardization.
Standard Sizes takes its departure from Pierre Menard's line-by-line
rewriting of Don Quixote; the standardization of canvas sizes in the
French Academy; the Kuleshov effectís suggestion of affect from juxtaposition;
Duchamp's 3 Standard Stoppages; CMYK color; imperial units of measurement;
lorem ipsum text, based on a dark passage from Cicero; standard paper sizes;
modernism as a rhetorical vernacular; stochastic music and seriality; cinematic
aspect ratios; T.S. Eliotís poetics of 'impersonality'; generative algorithms;
as well as the possibility of meaning in the difference produced by repetition.
Artists included in this exhibition: Ricci Albenda, Kjell Bjorgeengen, Kerstin Brätsch, Martin Creed, Liz Deschenes, Morgan Fisher, Rachel Harrison, Imi Knoebel, Camilla Low, Allan McCollum, Brian OíConnell, Blinky Palermo, Richard Pettibone, Josh Smith, Matt Sheridan Smith, and Sturtevant.
