‘Philosophy Of Time Travel’

 At Studio Museum Harlem

 

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‘PHILOSOPHY OF TIME TRAVEL’ AT STUDIO MUSEUM HARLEM, w/1 cut

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NEW YORK CITY — What if history had a mind of its own, moving from the past, through the present and into the future? A team of five artists is exploring this idea with a large-scale installation, “Philosophy of Time Travel,” opened April 11 at The Studio Museum in Harlem. The exhibit will be on view through July 1.

The installation evokes the work of modernist sculptor Constantin Brancusi (1876–1957), forcefully and dynamically pushing his massive 1938 work, “Endless Column,” through the Studio Museum’s gallery space. The result is a fictional world in which history comes to life, crashes through the exhibition space and traverses through histories of art and museums.

“‘Philosophy of Time Travel’ harnesses Brancusi’s seminal, classic modernist work to challenge the contemporary, as if the sculpture grew beyond its bounds and appeared, by magic or some cryptic science, in the Studio Museum,” says Christine Y. Kim, associate curator at the Studio Museum in Harlem. “By being installed here, at a culturally specific art institution, its commentaries on the nature of history and time are also variously applied to the histories and structures of Harlem and African Americans.”

Brancusi’s “Endless Column,” an outdoor sculpture in Târgu Jiu, Romania, is a 100-foot-tall series of cast-iron rhombus shapes, resembling a stylized version of a traditional Romanian funerary pillar. In angling the vertical modules through the Studio Museum’s galleries — four of them penetrate through from floor to ceiling — the artists also recall the imagined flight of Brancusi’s classic “Bird in Space” series, Modernism’s great evocations of movement and grace. The installation brings the outside in, the past into the future, and the still into sinuous movement, shattering the walls of the museum space and the present alike.

The installation also includes an introductory video with the music of Sun Ra, who had a “cosmic philosophy” of his own. The five artists involved in the project — Edgar Arceneaux, Vincent Galen Johnson, Olga Koumoundouros, Rodney McMillian and Matthew Sloly — studied together at CalArts and have been involved in a wide range of solo and group exhibitions around the world.

They work in different media, from sculpture to photography to digital technology, but often find common ground. In this case, the 2001 cut film Donnie Darko, which features an imaginary book called The Philosophy of Time Travel, inspired them to think about how art history bends back on itself.

Organized by associate curator Christine Y. Kim, the exhibit is accompanied by a DVD and full-color catalog.

Arceneaux is a multimedia artist whose work has been presented by the UCLA Hammer Museum, The Studio Museum in Harlem, and other venues throughout the United States, Germany, The Netherlands and Canada.

Writer and photographer Galen Johnson has written extensively on Modernism, architecture and African American history. His work is exhibited at LAXART in “Vincent Johnson,” 2007, and was shown at the Studio Museum in Harlem in “Freestyle,” 2001.

Koumoundouros is an installation artist whose work has been shown in solo shows in “D300,” 2001, at CalArts Gallery and the INMO Gallery in Los Angeles, 1999.

Koumoundouros and Rodney McMillian were included in “Thing,” 2005, at the Hammer and McMillian has also exhibited his work at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and in “Frequency,” 2005, at the Studio Museum in Harlem.

Canadian-born Sloly has extensive experience in digital technology and simulated the installation and destruction of “Philosophy of Time Travel.” His work is being shown in the current solo exhibition, “Drawing (Toward) A Semantic Interface Layer,” at the Adamski Gallery, Aachen, Germany.

The Studio Museum in Harlem is at 144 West 125th Street, between Adam Clayton Powell Jr Boulevard and Lenox Avenue. For information, www.studiomuseum.org or 212-864-4500.