Bruno Dubner, Untitled, 2012, gelatin silver print without camera, size variable

Never Underestimate a Monochrome

The University of Iowa Museum
September 30, 2012 – January 31, 2013

The Wignall Museum of Contemporary Art
February 1 – March 2, 2013

Meant to activate the poetic, political and performative registers of the monochrome, Never Underestimate a Monochrome (2012) is a conceptual project conceived and organized by Mariángeles Soto-Díaz in a collaborative partnership with the University of Iowa Museum of Art. Artists from different parts of the world interpreted instructions written by Soto-Díaz, and provided documentation of their monochrome performance for a digital archival space, bringing the textual, embodied and mediated aspects of the monochrome into dialogue. The collective event occurred over the summer of 2012 across the globe, defying the logic of the event as necessarily bound to a singular physical and temporal space.

Without heroic gestures but always paradoxical: the monochrome has been accused of being threatening, and not threatening enough—joke and elegy of modernism. In its most radical gesture, the monochrome asks the questions pertaining not just to the material constitution of painting, but to the territory of its limits, potentially dematerializing the notion of painting altogether. It is as if the monochrome insists on asking: Is this enough to constitute a painting?

It is the monochrome’s dual physical and textual presence that tests the commitment of looking. Always energized through its cyclic return, the monochrome performs as alternately easy, impenetrable, fake, mute, sublime, honest, and even boring in its simplicity. It is perhaps this performative versatility that has allowed the monochrome to be able (and willing) to return.

In Never Underestimate a Monochrome, I create a role for the monochrome’s resourceful disposition by setting up performative functions designed to connect the artists. The monochrome, here a material manifestation of instructions, is also a connecting node for each of the participants. The instructions allow artists to focus on the gesture of connection folded into the making process. Convening these works together reveals discrepancies and parallels between artists’ interpretations of the instructions, which from the start embrace the promise of a connective thread between monochrome works, artists, past and future.

Participating artists:
David Batchelor (Scotland/UK), Emilio Chapela (Mexico), Jason Corder (Kenya), Jaime Davidovich (Argentina), Bruno Dubner (Argentina), Maria Jose Duran (Chile/USA), Anoka Faruqee (USA), Stacy Fisher (USA), Ken Friedman (Australia), Babak Golkar (Canada), Michelle Grabner (USA), Billy Gruner / Sarah Keighery (Australia), Brent Hallard (Japan/USA), Beth Harland (UK), Lynne Harlow (USA), Sue Hettmansperger (USA), Odili Odita (Nigeria), Naoshi Okura (Japan/Sweden), Karina Peisajovich (Argentina), Pineapple Park (Australia), Dai Roberts (UK), Huseyin Sami (Australia), Lizi Sanchez (Peru/UK), Claudia Sbrissa (Canada/Italy/USA), Suzanne Stroebe (USA), Hadi Tabatabai (Iran/USA), Sherwin Tibayan (Philippines/USA), Douglas Witmer (USA), Horacio Zabala (Argentina), Patricia Zarate (Colombia/USA)

http://www.neverunderestimateamonochrome.org

• Happenings

Barbara Rose. Monochromes from Malevich to the Present, University of California Press, Berkley, Los Angeles, London, 2004

The first comprehensive study of the modern history of monochrome art, Monochromes traces the development of single-color artwork—painting, sculpture, photography, video, and installations—up to the present. With almost 160 full-color reproductions, this stunning book examines fundamental aesthetic issues raised by the monochrome in a historical context. The authors ask whether the monochrome is the last and most radical phase of abstract painting or instead a point of departure for installations and environments. Among the many artists featured in this book are Alexander Rodchenko, Georgia O’Keeffe, Lucio Fontana, Yves Klein, Ad Reinhardt, Frank Stella, Andy Warhol, Robert Irwin, and Isamu Noguchi. The book includes writings on the monochrome by twenty-six artists, from Kasimir Malevich to Warhol, and from Carl Andre, Reinhardt, and Donald Judd to Ben Nicholson, Robert Ryman, and Anish Kapoor. In an engaging essay, Barbara Rose deftly surveys the divergent complex issues raised by the monochrome.

• Modern Contexts