© Richard Serra. Courtesy ARS, NY and DACS, London, 2015 and Gagosian Gallery

The Graham Foundation and the Goethe-Institut Chicago are pleased to present a rare screening of films by German filmmaker and television art pioneer Gerry Schum. From 1968 to 1970, Gerry Schum broadcasted original artist films through German public television. This radical model bypassed traditional institutions with the direct dispersal of artwork into the domestic space. International in scope, Schum’s productions featured work by Joseph Beuys, Alighiero Boetti, Jan Dibbets, Richard Long, Mario Merz, Richard Serra, Robert Smithson, among others. Albeit brief, Schum’s project introduced a new framework for viewing earthworks and conceptual and performance art in the context of everyday life.

On June 11, 2014, Gerry Schum’s television productions return to the domestic space with a rare screening at the Graham Foundation’s historic Madlener House. The program includes Fernsehgalerie's two television exhibitions, Land Art (1969) and Identifications (1970), along with Dies alles Herzchen wird einmal dir gehören (All This Darling Will Once Belong To You) (1967) and Konsumkunst - Kunstkonsum (1968)—two early documentary works Schum produced for Hessischer Rundfunk, Hesse and Westdeutscher Rundfunk, Cologne. The first occasion to screen all four works together in Chicago, the event sheds light on this lesser-known collaboration between European and American artists between 1967-1970. The screenings will be introduced by curator Robyn Farrell.

FILMS:

Gerry Schum, Land Art - Fernsehausstellung I, Fernsehgalerie Berlin, 1969, DVD transfer, 32:00. 
Richard Long, Barry Flanagan, Dennis Oppenheim, Robert Smithson, Marinus Boezem, Jan Dibbets, Walter de Maria. Courtesy Groninger Museum, Groningen, Netherlands.

Gerry Schum, Identifications - Fernsehausstellung II, Fernsehgalerie Berlin, 1970, Video. 36:00. 
Joseph Beuys, Reiner Ruthenbeck, Klaus Reinke, Ulrich Rückriem, Daniel Buren, Hamish Fulton, Gilbert & George, Stanley Brouwn, Ger van Elk, Giovanni Anselmo, Alighiero Boetti, Pier Paolo Calzolari, Gino de Dominicis, Mario Merz, Gilberto Zorio, Gary Kuehn, Keith Sonnier, Richard Serra, Franz Erhard Walther, Lawrence Weiner. 
Courtesy LIMA, Amsterdam, Netherlands.

Gerry Schum, Dies alles Herzchen wird einmal dir gehören (All This Darling Will Once Belong To You), Hessischer Rundfunk, Hesse, 1967. DVD transfer 6:55 min. Performance organized by Paul Maenz and Peter Roehr, Galerie Dorothea Loehr. September 9,1967, Frankfurt am Main, recorded by Gerry Schum.

Gerry Schum, Konsumkunst - Kunstkonsum, Westdeutscher Rundfunk, Cologne, 1968, DVD transfer from 16mm, 29:32.

This event is made possible with the generous support of the Goethe-Institut Chicago.

Gerry Schum (b. Cologne 1938-1973) was educated in television and film production at the Deutches Institut fer und Fersehen in Munich, and at Fernsehakademie from 1961-1968. He began work as a cameraman and filmmaker for television broadcast stations in Berlin around 1966, completing a series of documentary collaborations for television broadcast: Schaustücke—Ereignisse (Showpieces—Events, 1967); 6. Kunst-Biennale San Marino (1967); and Konsumkunst-Kunstkosum (Consumption-Art, Art-Consumption, 1968). Together with Ursula Wevers, he initiated Fernsehgalerie Gerry Schum, 1968-1970 and Videogalerie Schum, 1971-1973. Over the course of five years Schum worked as producer and cameraman to broadcast and distribute artist films and videos by John Baldessari, Joseph Beuys, Jan Dibbets, Gilbert & George, Michael Heizer, Mario Merz, Bruce Nauman, Ulrich Rückriem, Richard Serra, Keith Sonnier, Ger van Elk, Lawrence Weiner, among others. In 1972 Schum was commissioned to present video art sections at Document 5 and the Venice Biennale. Before his death in 1973 Schum accepted the position of curator for the first video art studio at the Folkwang Museum in Essen, Germany.

Robyn Farrell is a Chicago-based writer and curator whose work explores the intersection of contemporary art, technology, and time-based media, and early European video collectives c. 1970. Farrell has written and organized programming for INTUIT: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art, the DePaul Art Museum, and Conversations at the Edge at the Gene Siskel Film Center, among others. She is currently Curatorial Assistant in the Department of Contemporary Art at the Art Institute of Chicago.

The Goethe-Institut is the cultural institute of the Federal Republic of Germany. Global in reach, the Goethe-Institut aims to promote knowledge of the German language abroad, foster international cultural cooperation, and convey a comprehensive picture of Germany by providing information on Germany's cultural, social and political life. For more information, visit www.goethe.de.

Please join us for a special screening of The European Rooms, a short film by media artist David K. Ross that presents intimate views of Enlightenment-era architectural interiors featured in the Art Institute of Chicago’s Thorne Rooms. In Ross’s newest work, an unhurried camera glides across drawing rooms, bedrooms, dining rooms, and entrance halls filled with finely crafted furniture and carefully selected objets. Though well-appointed, this "sealed and stifling" world of privilege, class, and prestige is also inescapably uncanny and oneiric. A slow unraveling of cinematic, sonic and architectural space played out in real time, The European Rooms is as confounding as it is elucidatory.

David K. Ross works in a variety of media including film, video, photography and installation, and is based in Chicago and Montreal. His formal training as an architect and his experimentation with large format photography and film have resulted in a wide range of projects investigating the history of optical technologies and geodetic practices, museum taxonomies and transport systems, self-storage facilities, and urban infrastructures. Ross's work has been exhibited in major institutions in North America and Europe, and are included in private and public collections including the National Gallery of Canada, the Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal and the Canadian Centre for Architecture. His films and videos have been shown at CineMarfa (2012), Le Mois de la Photo à Montréal (2013), and the Festival Internacional de Cine en Guadalajara (2014).

Image: David K. Ross, The European Rooms, 2014. Production still, HD video, 27:30. Courtesy David K. Ross.

Recognized as one of the leading improvisers working to expand the limits and expectations of contemporary trumpet, Nate Wooley comes to the Graham Foundation to perform a new electro-acoustic work, "For Kenneth Gaburo," as well as solo amplified trumpet improvisations.

In his new project “For Kenneth Gaburo,” Wooley continues to explore the concept of combinatory sound, now using linguistics as an oral-mechanical source for affecting the acoustic sound of the trumpet. Wooley’s new piece takes texts by composer Kenneth Gaburo and combines synthesized tones on tape with manipulated trumpet techniques “to create shadings of the phonetic sounds inherent in the text.” The composition pays homage to two of Gaburo's masterpieces, "Maledetto" and "Mouthpiece II for Trumpet Sextet."

Nate Wooley (b. 1974) was born in Clatskanie, Oregon, a town of 2,000 people in the timber country of the Pacific Northwest. He began playing trumpet professionally with his father, a big band saxophonist, at the age of thirteen. Since moving to New York in 2001, he has become a leading trumpet player in the burgeoning Brooklyn jazz, improv, noise, and new music scenes. He has performed regularly with John Zorn, Anthony Braxton, Eliane Radigue, Ken Vandermark, Fred Frith, Evan Parker and Yoshi Wada, and collaborated with Chris Corsano, C. Spencer Yeh, Peter Evans, and Mary Halvorson. Wooley’s combination of vocalization, extreme extended technique, noise and drone aesthetics, amplification and feedback, and compositional rigor has led one reviewer to call his solo recordings "exquisitely hostile."

This performance is presented in partnership with Lampo. Founded in 1997, Lampo is a non-profit organization for experimental music, sound art, and intermedia projects. Visit www.lampo.org.

Image: Photo Peter Gannushkin.

Founding Fluxus member Alison Knowles will read selected works, including sections from her seminal piece House of Dust (1968-71). One of the first computer-generated poems, House of Dust evolved into an abstract environmental sculpture built out of five thousands pounds of concrete and fiberglass. Initially installed in New York, the structure was later moved to Los Angeles in 1971. To inaugurate the installation, Knowles and poet Normal Kaplan organized a “visual, physical poetry experience” where a helicopter dropped a one-thousand-foot-long printout of the poem onto the structure. With its multiple iterations in New York and Los Angeles, the House of Dust became a piece of serial architecture generated rather than designed by a set of procedures and heuristic constraints.

House of Dust is currently on view in the Graham Foundation's exhibition Everything Loose Will Land.

Alison Knowles is a visual artist known for her sound works, installations, performances, and publications. A founding member of the experimental avant-garde group Fluxus, Alison Knowles continues to create work that incorporates performance, radio and sound, papermaking, and printmaking. Knowles has exhibited her work at numerous institutions, including the Museum of Modern Art and the Tate Modern, and has received multiple awards and fellowships, including a Guggenheim Fellowship (1968) and a Documenta Professorship at the Kunstakaedmie Kassel (1996-7).

Image: Alison Knowles, House of Dust, 1971. Photograph, 10 ½ x 8 ½ inches. Copyright Alison Knowles. Courtesy of the California Institute of the Arts, Institute Archive. Photo Joshua White.

For more information on the exhibition, Everything Loose Will Land, click here.

Please joins us to celebrate the opening of Everything Loose Will Land, with remarks by curator Sylvia Lavin.

6PM  Remarks by curator Sylvia Lavin
6:30-8:30PM  Opening Reception

Sylvia Lavin is a leading figure in contemporary architectural history, theory, and criticism. Lavin is the recipient of a 2011 Arts and Letters Award, as well as previous awards from the Getty Center, the Kress Foundation, and the Social Science Research Council. In addition to her most recent book, Kissing Architecture (Princeton University Press, 2011) Lavin is the author of Quatremere de Quincy and the Invention of a Modern Language of Architecture (MIT Press, 1992); Form Follows Libido: Architecture and Richard Neutra in a Psychoanalytic Culture (MIT Press, 2005); and the forthcoming The Flash in the Pan and Other Forms of Architectural Contemporaneity (recipient of a Graham Foundation grant). She initiated a series of architectural projects for the Hammer Museum, and has been a guest curator for the Canadian Center for Architecture, Montreal, and Ace Galleries.

Image: Ron Herron (Archigram), Manzak in Griffith Park, 1969. Collage, 7 1/2 x 9 1/2 inches. Copyright Ron Herron (Archigram). Courtesy of Simon Herron.

For more information on the exhibition, Everything Loose Will Land, click here.

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