Opening Of 'A Journey That Wasn’t' @ The Broad Museum

A Journey That Wasn’t considers artists’ complex representations of time, and features the return of the beloved video installation, The Visitors, by Ragnar Kjartansson. The exhibition presents more than 20 artists including Bernd and Hilla Becher, Gregory Crewdson, Andreas Gursky, Elliott Hundley, Pierre Huyghe, Anselm Kiefer, Sherrie Levine, Glenn Ligon, Sharon Lockhart, Paul Pfeiffer and Ed Ruscha. The featured works in the exhibition—ranging from painting and sculpture to photography, film and installation—examine the passage of time by alluding to nostalgia or sentiments about aging, often depicting specific places in states of decay; these works can act as documentation, memorial or symbol. Still others imply movement or narrative within single still images; in these works, historical styles and events are ruptured, collaged and re-contextualized as to become portals into seemingly other worlds. is on view through at The Broad Museum 221 South Grand Avenue Los Angeles. photographs by Oliver Maxwell Kupper

Stand Still Like a Hummingbird

Jerry McMillan, Ed Ruscha with six of his books on his head, 1970

David Zwirner gallery in New York presents Stand Still like the Hummingbird, an exhibition curated by Bellatrix Hubert in the gallery’s 525 and 533 spaces. It takes its title from a collection of short stories and essays by American writer Henry Miller, published in 1962. Known equally for his mysticism and dark humor, Miller proposed the idea of “flying backwards, standing still like a hummingbird” as a lighthearted antidote to the frantic pace of modern society. The exhibition also embraces the paradox in the appropriation of its title – the hummingbird only appears still because of the rapidity of its wings – and gathers a selection of paintings, sculptures, and videos by artists who engage with contradictions, impossibilities, and the absurd. The exhibition also explores the notion of "understated gestures and formal restraint" - finding its historical starting point in Marcel Duchamp's Comb and other readymades artworks that came to influence a century of art making. Works in the show include Forty-two postcards by On Kawara, stamped by the time he got up on a given day and simply titled I Got Up(1968-1976), a collection of Ed Ruscha’s photobooks (1964-1978), works by Bernd and Hilla Becher, Francis Alÿs, Marcel Duchamp, and more. Stand Still Like a Hummingbird will be on view from June 28 to August 3, 2012 at David Zwirner gallery, 525 West 19th Street, New York.

The Shaping of New Visions

Valie Export, Einkreisung (Encirclement) from the series Körperkonfigurationen (Body Configurations). 1976.

The Shaping of New Visions: Photography, Film, Photobook, on view this month at the MOMA in New York, covers the period from 1910 to today, offers a critical reassessment of photography's role in the avant-garde and neo-avant-garde movements—with a special emphasis on the medium's relation to Dada, Bauhaus, Surrealism, Constructivism, New Objectivity, Conceptual, and Post-Conceptual art—and in the development of contemporary artistic practices. The shaping of what came to be known as "New Vision" photography bore the obvious influence of "lens-based" and "time-based" works. El Lissitzky best summarized its ethos: "The new world will not need little pictures," he wrote in The Conquest of Art (1922). "If it needs a mirror, it has the photograph and the cinema." The Shaping of New Visions: Photography, Film, Photobook will be on view at the Museum of Contemporary art from April 18 to April 29, 2013.