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An exhibition tracing media and conceptual artist Peter Weibel's developments from his beginnings through 1979
Slought is pleased to announce Peter Weibel, Rewriter, an exhibition featuring early (conceptual) photographs, (expanded) films, (body) videos and (contextual) works from 1964-1975, on display from January 31-March 11, 2009. The exhibition is the first retrospective of Weibel's work to be organized in America, and will be on display in the Slought Foundation galleries from January 31 - March 11, 2009. The opening reception will take place on Saturday, January 31, 2009 from 6:30pm until 8:30pm; live samba and bossanova with Os Humanos will follow until 10:30pm.
This exhibition traces internationally-renowned media and conceptual artist Peter Weibel's artistic developments from his beginnings through 1979. Weibel started out in 1964 as a visual poet, and was soon transferring the structures of the visual culture from the page to the screen, while still retaining the model of language as one of perception. Later, he developed a critical impulse that turned not only against art but also against society and the media itself. This specific development from the page via the screen to gallery space--all happening as early as the 1960s--anticipated many of the trends that were later to be described as conceptual art, context art, institutional criticism, and intervention.
Room 1: Installations
Possible, 1969
The Prince of Darkness, 1970
Light Rope, 1969
Room 2: Conceptual Poetry
Proposition, 1964
Cheek to cheek, 1965
Mirror Eve, 1966
Contradiction, 1966
Paradox of Autology (Small-Smaller, Big-Bigger), 1966
Principles of Poetry (Hope), 1971
Principles of Poetry (Resistance), 1971
Against Gravitation, 1972
Soliloquy, 1973, video
Sense, 1968, video
Room 3: Conceptual Photography
Self-portrait as Anonymous, 1967, wallpaper
Self-portrait as a Woman, 1967, wallpaper
Self-portrait of the Artist as a young Dog, 1967, wallpaper
Rites of Identity, 1972
The Measurement of Measure, 1975
Physical Paradox, 1974
The formal Explication of the Concept of Antinomy, Werner Schimanovich/ Peter Weibel, 1975
Trinity, 1975, video
Self-Limitation, 1971, video
Self-Drawing, 1971, video
Self-Description, 1971, video
Parenthetical Identity, 1972, video
Room 4: Expanded Films
Tap- and Touchcinema, 1968, video
From the map of dogginess, 1968, video
Room 5: Tele-Actions
The endless Sandwich, 1969, video
TV News (TV Death 2), 1970, video
TV Aquarium (TV Death 1), 1970, video
Depiction is a Crime, 1970, video
Intervals, 1971, video
Virtual Watersculpture, 1971, video
Synthesis, 1967, video
Is that Art, 1972, video
Room 6: Body Videos
Fluidum and Property, 1971, video
Fluidum and Property, 1971, video
Timeblood, 1972, video
Switcher Sex, 1972, video
Solution of Phantasy, 1972, video
Eyetext, 1974, video
Room 7: Contextual Works
Trampling on Law with Feet, 1968, video
Stoppages-étalon (1913/14) by Marcel Duchamp, reconstructed 1970, video
Reconstructions, 1970
Exhibited Space (Quick Decisions please Everywhere), 1969
Dismantled Spaces exhibited as ready-mades, 1971
Police lies, 1970
Peter Weibel was born in 1944 in Odessa, and lives and works in Karlsruhe, Germany and Vienna, Austria. Since 1966, Weibel has created conceptual photo-literature as well as audio pieces, - texts, -objects and -actions. At the end of the 1960s, he worked in the field of Expanded Cinema, action art, performances and film together with his partner Valie Export. His interdisciplinary activities comprise scientific, artistic as well as literary, photographic, graphic, plastic, and digital works. Weibel was, and continues to be, an early and eloquent champion of a theory of communication responding to the rise of new media. Beginning with work in the tradition of visual poetry, Weibel produced «media-based literature» in the form of paper, photographic and object poems, body texts and material poetry, text objects and video texts.
Conceptual works and actions followed, together with media analyses employing the media under scrutiny, initial TV experiments on Austria's ORF, and later numerous installations deploying film and video. The publication of candid sexual representations in a black book on Viennese Actionism led to a lawsuit against its publishers Valie Export and Peter Weibel in 1970. Both artists continued to support each other's projects into the late 1970s. His subjects are less body-oriented, however, and deliver from a media-specific and semiological viewpoint. His works question the cult of the artist through socially critical analyses of media and systems including film, television, and the visual arts.
Weibel considers his theoretical and curatorial work to be a facet of his artistic practice. He is the Chief Curator of the Neue Galerie, Graz, and since 1999, chairman of the ZKM Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie, Karlsruhe. For more information: http://on1.zkm.de/zkm/e/
His many exhibitions curated and publications edited include Making Things Public (with Bruno Latour, 2005) and Future Cinema (with Jeffrey Shaw, 2002). He has also been the artistic director of Ars Electronica in Linz, Austria, Professor at the University for Applied Art, Vienna, commissioner for the Austrian pavilion of the Venice Biennale, and director of the Institut für Neue Medien, Frankfurt (1989-94).
