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Charles Gaines, Notes on Social Justice: Wait Till Next
November, (1892), 2013; ink on Stonehenge paper; 75 x 40 inches.
Image via
artupdate.com.
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Notes on
Social Justice
September 7 - October 5, 2013
521 W 21st
Street
New York,
NY
From the
Paula Cooper Gallery web site:
For more
than forty years, Charles Gaines’ art has explored the relationship between
aesthetics, politics, language and systems. Gaines employs rule-based
methodologies to investigate ways in which meaning can be experienced in images
and words. Informed by sources as varied as Tantric Buddhist drawings, the
systemized work of Hanne Darboven, and John Cage’s notions of indeterminancy,
Gaines creates work that often employs plotting and mathematics to organize
visual components. He does not, however, deny the viewer’s sense of
subjectivity:
“The art work, the total art work, involves many aspects of myself, not just one, and they all want to participate in the work. But when the work is done they all disappear… There is nothing in my approach that tries to determine from my own interest what type of feeling you have."
This
exhibition will be comprised of four bodies of work. The first, Night/Crimes, begun in 1994, juxtaposes
photographs of stellar constellations with photographs of men convicted of
violent crimes. These images are accompanied by texts identifying the locations
of the crimes and the locations of particular sections of the sky. Gaines
suggests links between the crimes and the natural events, links that may or may
not, in fact, exist.
Skybox 1 consists of a light box measuring approximately
seven by twelve feet. The light box illuminates blown up images of political
texts on oppression, colonialism and liberation, democracy and freedom. The
texts are by the 17th century religious reformer Gerard Winstanley, and
twentieth century philosophers and political leaders Léopold Sédar
Senghor,Frantz Fanon, and Ho Chi Minh. At regular intervals, the light box dims
so that the texts disappear, revealing thousands of points of light that
suggest a star-filled night sky.
Manifesto 2 is an installation consisting of two
parts: four single channel video monitors, each one dedicated to one of four
texts of revolutionary manifestos; and four large graphite drawings of music
scores that were created through a systemized translation of the texts. The
texts are from An Indigenous Manifesto
(1999) by Canada’s Taiaiake Alfred; Malcom X’s last public speech, held in 1965
at Detroit’s Ford Auditorium; Raul Alcaraz and Daniel Carrillo’s Indocumentalismo from 2010; and the Declaration on the Rights of Women,
written by Olympe De Gouges in 1791. Gaines has composed scores from each
manifesto, translating the letters of the texts to their corresponding musical
notes.
The most
recent body of work in the show is entitled Notes
on Social Justice and is comprised of large-scale drawings of musical
scores from songs dealing with political subject matter. The songs include many
from the American Civil War as well as more recent songs dating from the middle
of the 20th Century.
Charles
Gaines will be the subject of a major exhibition at The Studio Museum in Harlem
in 2014. The exhibition will focus on his work from the 1970s and 1980s. Last
year, the Pomona College Museum of Art and Pitzer College, Claremont,
California, presented a survey of his work from 1975 to 2012. Manifestos was shown in 2011 at the UCLA
Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. Among numerous group exhibitions both in the United
States and internationally, Gaines’ work was recently included in Blues for Smoke, organized by the Museum
of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and seen earlier this year at the Whitney
Museum of American Art, New York; Under
the Big Black Sun: California Art 1974-1981, 2011 at the Museum of
Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; and the 2007 Venice Biennale, Italy. He is a 2013
recipient of a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.
Gaines
lives and works in Los Angeles and for more than 25 years has been on the
faculty of the California Institute of the Arts, Valencia.
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