One at a time
A Scotiabank Nuit Blance 2010 Presentation
2 October 2010
6:57 pm - Sunrise
Hart House and the University of Toronto Art Centre
Featuring projects by Marina Abramović and Ulay, Dean Baldwin, Gerald Ferguson, General Idea, Jens Haaning, Michael Snow, Josh Thorpe, and Joyce Wieland.
IMAGE CREDIT: Marina Abramović and Ulay, Imponderabilia, 1977. © Marina Abramović
This Nuit Blanche, a mound of one million Canadian pennies is one of the exciting art projects that visitors will encounter at Hart House and the University of Toronto’s Art Centre, both located at the heart of the University of Toronto’s campus and just a few steps southwest of Museum Subway Station.
The glistening pile of $10,000 worth of pennies by the late Canadian artist Gerald Ferguson will be part of a special assembly of historical and contemporary art projects by internationally renowned artists Marina Abramović and Ulay, Michael Snow and Joyce Wieland, General Idea, David Askevold, Jens Haaning, and others. Each project involves questions of measurement, and is propelled by the artists' interest in devising new frameworks through which we might see and experience things in the world – including ourselves and others.
Highlights include Imponderabilia by Marina Abramović and Ulay, a sensational performance for which two naked performers stand facing each other across an entrance way. As in the original 1977 performance, visitors to the Hart House are invited to pass between them, encountering a strange intimacy brought on by the vulnerability of the performers. As the artists first described it: “The public entering the museum has to turn sideways to move through the limited space between us; everyone wanting to get past has to choose one of us.” The work creates a new and unfamiliar space and involves visitors in a tense relationship, at once public and private.
Further into the Hart House, visitors are invited to ponder Michael Snow and Joyce Wieland’s collaborative project Dripping Water, a film of water dripping from a tap with a giddy, asynchronic sound track.
Especially commissioned for Nuit Blanche is a new work involving a voluntary survey of University of Toronto students and staff birthplaces. Danish artist Jens Haaning devises a festive installation of national flags representing the wide array of countries in which students of the present-day university were born. The project is a testimony to internationalism and globalization, and a microcosm of the ever-growing diversity of the city of Toronto itself.
IMAGE CREDIT: Gerald Ferguson, 1,000,000 Canadian Pennies, 1979. Collection of the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia. Gift of the artist.
In the Hart House courtyard, under the open sky, will be what has become a Nuit Blanche tradition: Toronto artist Dean Baldwin, self-described ‘barchitect’, will host the bar and grill for the night, from 7:00 pm to 4:00 am.
Last but not least, visitors are invited to the University of Toronto Art Centre (across the Hart House parking lot), and its exhibition of the multifarious results of a widely disseminated questionnaire by renowned Canadian art collective General Idea. The original survey – devised during the late and heady days of the 1960s Sexual Revolutions – had participants record the number and “energy level” of orgasms over a set period of time. For Nuit Blanche, the complete Orgasm Energy Chart will be available for take-away, and may be continued at one’s own leisure.
Also on view at the University of Toronto Art Centre is a participatory project consisting of a revisitation of the late Canadian artist David Askevold’s unusual art school curriculum, known internationally as the “Projects Class” of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. For the class, Askevold invited influential Conceptual artists to send ideas for artistic projects and exhibitions that his students would then complete. In preparation for Nuit Blanche, the Projects Class has been re-instated in order to display the class projects of a new generation of artists.
Presented in conjunction with Traffic: Conceptual Art in Canada 1965-1980
Installation Views:
One at a time @ Hart House, University of Toronto, 2010
