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PLANS ARE REVEALED: CURATOR DAVE
HICKEY ON SITE SANTA FE'S FOURTH INTERNATIONAL BIENNIAL BEAU MONDE: TOWARD
A REDEEMED COSMOPOLITANISM
Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA - Plans are well underway for SITE Santa Fe's Fourth
International Biennial BEAU MONDE: TOWARD A REDEEMED COSMOPOLITANISM,
which opens July 14, 2001 and features Dave Hickey as curator. With a fresh
curatorial approach, Dave Hickey is planning a non traditional SITE Santa
Fe biennial exhibition. Hickey writes,
For the SITE Santa
Fe 2001 Biennial, I plan to mount an exhibition entitled BEAU MONDE:
TOWARD A REDEEMED COSMOPOLITANISM. I begin this project without any
preconceived notion of what a beau monde, or a "beautiful world," might
be, only with a confirmed confidence that most artists have their own
ideas about it--their own vision of how a beau monde might look--and that
this vision is somehow embodied in their work. My task in mounting this
exhibition will be to create a confluence of such concrete visions--a
melting pot in which nothing melts, in which works of art from around
the world, experienced in relation to one another in a space designed
for them, will invest the elusive idea of a beau monde with new specificity
and complexity, new meaning and resonance.
With the aid of
Graft Design (a Los Angeles-based design firm, and the first artist
group to be signed on to participate in BEAU MONDE: TOWARD A REDEEMED
COSMOPOLITANISM), I plan to design a complex, coherent exhibition
hall composed of interlocking spaces that are physically (not iconographically)
evocative of various regional cultural milieus (Mediterranean, Japanese,
Western American, Northern European, etc.), then install within them
singular works of art, which celebrate the global field of overlapping
and interfused idiomatic expressionÑthe virtuoso accommodation of one
cultural idiom to another that constitutes the very definition of cosmopolitanism.
Dave Hickey is a freelance
writer of fiction and cultural criticism. He is professor of Art Criticism
and Theory at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and contributing
editor to Art Issues magazine in Los Angeles. He has served as
owner/director of A Clean Well-Lighted Place gallery in Austin, Texas;
as director of the Reese Palley Gallery in New York City; as executive
editor of Art in America; and as contributing editor to The
Village Voice. Mr. Hickey has written for major publications including
Rolling Stone, Art News, Art in America, Artforum, Interview, Harper's
Magazine, Vanity Fair, Nest, The New York Times, and The Los
Angeles Times.
Dave Hickey's critical essays
on art have been collected in two volumes published by Art Issues Press.
The Invisible Dragon: Four Essays on Beauty (1993) is in its
sixth printing, and Air Guitar: Essays on Art and Democracy (1998)
is now in its third printing. Both books of essays have had a significant
impact on contemporary art criticism. Dave Hickey's latest book, Stardumb,
featuring stories by Hickey and artwork by John de Fazio, was published
in 1999 by Artspace Books, San Francisco.
Lecturing extensively at
universities and art institutions, Dave Hickey has an international
reputation as an art personality and writer. He has been the subject
of profiles in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, U.S. News
and World Report, Texas Monthly, and other publications. Interviews
with Hickey have appeared in The Los Angeles Times, Bomb, New Art
Examiner, and other newspapers and journals, and have been presented
on PBS television and National Public Radio stations.
Dave Hickey most recently
curated Ultralounge: The Return of Social Space (with Cocktails).
The exhibition featured the works of eleven young Las Vegas and Los
Angeles-based artists. Organized by, and held at DiverseWorks Artspace
in Houston, Texas in 1998, the successful Ultralounge traveled to The University of South Florida Contemporary Art Museum, Tampa, Florida, and was on exhibit January 14 – March 3, 2000.
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Photo: Libby Lumpkin
Art in background: Dan Flavin |
