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12 horses in an art gallery

In New York this weekend at the Gavin Brown art gallery 12 horses graze, poop and go about their business , and it is called “arte povera”. I am just sad that I missed this because I love “poor” art and horses.

This is the first time that Jannis Kounellis’s “Untitled (12 Horses)” a legendary work of living installation art first executed in Rome in 1969 has been presented in America. Arte Povera is the Italian wing of Post-Minimalism known for using common or humble materials. The New York Times puts this simply and clearly : “art could be absolutely anything, as long as a certain level of intensity differentiated it from real life.”

jannis kounellis.

From Vulture.com , an excellent article here:

For all their faults, flaws, weirdness, and self-aggrandizement, all art galleries are gifts to us all. They are free and open to the public, for anyone, just not for everyone, places to have conclaves, conversations, conversion experiences, and holy-shit recognitions. Right now, one of New York’s galleries is bestowing a gift to all art lovers. Between now and 6 p.m. Saturday, when Gavin Brown Gallery closes its doors for the last time at its magical no-man’s location between Soho, the Hudson River, and West Chelsea, the gallery is restaging one of the most iconic works of 1960s Conceptualism/Arte Povera/performance and installation art: Jannis Kounellis’s Untitled (12 Horses).

Brown’s large west gallery is emptied of everything except a quieting, supple, rubberized floor. Tethered to walls are 12 horses. Far from being yet another example of the revival of this or that work of 1960s or 1970s art — a trope that has become depressingly familiar in today’s art world always on the lookout for some niche of recent art history that needs marketing — the sight of these immense animal presences in an art gallery comes on with almost metaphysical force. For me, horses are an other otherness, a higher order of it. Creatures that tranquilize my responses, awe me, make me know a manifest uncanniness of identity. I love and fear them in ways I can’t fathom. Whatever they are, their presence in an art gallery — peaceful, delicate, humbling — is something we don’t know we need to know until we know them, and then are grateful for knowing. This is an apt metaphor for what art galleries can do.

The horses are handsome, not the draught horses used in the original, which was staged in 1969 in an underground Italian garage with a hard tiled floor. Nor are they the broken animals we were used to seeing about Central Park. Poised, quiet, calm, they stand at three of the gallery’s four walls, eating hay from buckets attached to the wall, neighing occasionally, rustling, relieving themselves. They are attended to at all times by three loving grooms. The room has a reverence, not for a work of art but for life, and the ways it can embed itself in things we call art. It’s a crazy love, this albumen of the mind that is impregnated with thoughts of something being more or other or different than what it is, magic, elemental, us, not us.

In many ways, what’s going on in Brown’s space is what’s going on in all art galleries all the time, for someone, somewhere. Someone is sliding away from hard reality to some other destination, a place that is just as real, sometimes more so than the reality they’re in. Brown is part of a great generation of dealers who opened galleries in the 1990s, people whose purpose was to somehow to make money while making worlds possible where they, and the kind of art that they thought helped people, slide into these other destinations. 

By itself, the work stills the spirit and lifts the senses. Adding to that, the gallery hasn’t really publicized this in any way. It’s more for the odd, extended, amorphous family of the art world. This isn’t a Kusama-effect situation, where lines of people wait to walk into the space, take a selfie, and leave after hashtagging. It’s just for people who may be lucky enough to happen by it or feel a calling to visit. No matter what you think of these three works of art or this gallery’s program, the show is a reminder of just how special and fragile our art world is, how even when seen through laser-lit filters of cynicism, capital, and developers, all of this is temporary and for free.

jannis kounellis

jannis kounellis

jannis kounellis 1

jannis kounellis

Below : the original version in Rome, 1969. Credit : courtesy the artist Claudio Abate, Cheim & Read and Gavin Brown’s Enterprise.

jannis kounellis..

From the New York Times : When an image like this is made real, it can disappoint, but not this time. Overseen by Mr. Kounellis, who flew over from Italy, the New York version of “Untitled (12 Horses)” certainly lives up to the original photograph and may exceed the original piece. The horses are just there, standing, eating hay, occasionally snorting and relieving themselves, attended by three grooms. Their accommodation in a space that is recognizably an art gallery foments an especially concentrated encounter with the brute power of art and its ability to transform space. Perhaps it has to do with the floor, covered with black rubber obtained at the last minute to protect the horses’ feet. (They go home every night.) Equally important: the heightened contrast of white walls and dark matte floor, and the softening of sound, which contributes to the immense calming effect of the piece.  In any event, the elemental, curative force of animals and their size, and quiet, are felt more keenly in this setting than in a stable.

Brilliant !



2 responses to “12 horses in an art gallery”

  1. Isabel Mignoni says:

    Ginia,
    Gracias por compartir con los que leemos tu blog noticias como la exposición de Kounellis con la pieza de los caballos y todas las cosas que nos cuentas y nos informas. Todo lo que eliges como tema es siempre interesante. Leervacerca de esta exposición única y valiente me ha emocionado!
    Un beso fuerte!
    Isabel

    • fashionsphinx says:

      Gracias a ti !!!!!!! la pena es no tener mas tiempo para escribir todos todos los días que es lo que me gustaría.

      tu que eres galerista : me gusta sobre todo lo que Vulture.com escribe sobre las galerias de arte y sobre este show que ha pasado casi inapercibido y discretamente….solo para los amantes de arte y los que buscan experiencias únicas…y no para los que aman el arte como fondo de sus selfies :

      “By itself, the work stills the spirit and lifts the senses. Adding to that, the gallery hasn’t really publicized this in any way. It’s more for the odd, extended, amorphous family of the art world. This isn’t a Kusama-effect situation, where lines of people wait to walk into the space, take a selfie, and leave after hashtagging. It’s just for people who may be lucky enough to happen by it or feel a calling to visit. No matter what you think of these three works of art or this gallery’s program, the show is a reminder of just how special and fragile our art world is, how even when seen through laser-lit filters of cynicism, capital, and developers, all of this is temporary and for free.”

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